August 09, 2004

New Link

I would like to introduce you to some people out Ioway. (Yup, that's the state north of Missouri, and south of Minnesota) Mostly consisting of my mother's outlook on life and updates on my dad's health. I promised my mom I'd make her famous, so it's clearly getting linked on the side. Besides, she's my mother! XD

Yeah, she's where I get what little ability I have to write from. She made me write when I hated it, so I at least learned how to put coherent thoughts down on paper. And she's really, really good. Always has people in stitches with her letters.

Oh, and in less important news, I caught a little of TNT's terrorism-inspired new miniseries. The Grid, I think it's called. Of course, it would be just my luck to see the bit where they get data off a laptop harddrive captured in the field. Admittedly, I am no expert on the current state of military data-retrieval procedures. However, I still have a few questions...

Are there many people that *really* try to hot-swap IDE drives? I'm sure it's possible to plug it in without frying the thing; just be very careful. But the screen also instantaneously started bringing up picture after picture. That's a really fast analysis of the drive parameters and partition/filesystem info, no?

They found a picture of a dog. In each eye, they found an encoded map. The local guru called the result of the encoding process a 'dot matrix'. I.e., the color of each pixel represented a bit of information. What I want to know, is this the same sort of technology used in old and very noisy printers? Like my mom used to use to print labels for her Christmas cards?

I was going to complain about extreme compression ratios, but then decided that might be stupid. Some pretty amazing things are possible, given the right algorithms.

*turns off Overly-Analytical Geek Mode*

Posted by Ardith at August 9, 2004 11:12 PM | TrackBack