Jay's Random Thoughts

A fellow blogger recently emailed me about an episode of “How It’s Made” that he saw on TV.  For those of you who are not familiar with this, it is a show on The Discovery Channel that discusses how various items are made.  It covers things as simple as Twinkies and as complex as semiconductors.  It is kind of a mindless show. 

Anyway, Ryan was watching an episode where they discussed building PC’s.  They had a scene where the person was connecting the wires for the reset switch and power button and the voice over mentioned that they were connecting the “Computator”.  This is a complete gaffe since there is no such thing as a computator at least that we are aware of or could find on Google.  Evidently, the show just made this term up.  It certainly sounds complex, but ironically has no meaning!

Here is a link to a YouTube clip of the video.

One of the problem that occurs frequently for us is clogged gutters.  I am sure that many people experience similar problems and the source of the clogs will vary.  In our case, the problem is due to pine needs.  We are blessed with numerous large pine trees, but that can also be a curse as pine needles are very difficult to rake in the fall and seem to clog the gutter quite easily.

The question then is whether one of those gutter systems that claims to prevent gunk from getting into the gutters will work in our case or whether our best bet is to increase the frequency of cleaning.  I am still debating this.  My concern about the gutter systems is that I have no idea if they work since pine needles are actually quite small and so they may pass through the system.  Does anyone have any experinece with this?

I also recently ran across a robot from iRobot called the Looj. This is one of those robots like the roomba that supposably will clean the gutter.  In theoru, it would require you to simply put the unit in a gutter and it will automatically handle the rest.  I have no idea if this works, but the idea certainly appeals to the techie in me.  It does sound too good to be true and so I am skeptical.

I was recently perusing the Internet and ran into the YouTube video below.  It is very cool and my immediate thought is “How does this guy have the time and money to do all of this?”  Regardless, his time and money is our gain.  This is just a very cool video and it is kind of uplifting.  Perhaps it is just the simple act of dancing with all of the various people in the around the world.

Update: I found another site that has a high definition version of this video.  Even better althought quite bandwidth intensive.  It choked on my wireless and worked fine on my wired connection.  (As I posted in the past, my downstream bandwidth is actually quite good.)  Here is the URL: http://www.vimeo.com/1211060?pg=embed&sec=1211060&hd=1