On February 10th, 2001 at approximately 4:09 PM CST, using laptop-based Cisco IP SoftPhone on the Space Shuttle Atlantis, Astronaut Marsha Ivin made the first and second telephone calls ever from space.

After confirming with the Flight Commander, Marsha started SoftPhone and at approximately 4:09PM made a call to the Flight Director. The call went from her SoftPhone software through a VG-200 gateway, over an FXO port, through a PBX to the phone on the Flight Director’s desk. At the end Marsha called one of the Cisco 7960 phones in the Payload Operations Center, which was answered by Brett Parrish, lead NASA engineer on this project. Marsha asked “So how do you like getting the second ever call from space?”.

Joseph sent me another great use for web tech: The live streaming Honolulu Traffic Cam. Now you can see how irritating Honolulu traffic is from the comfort of your own bathroom. That is, if you have net access in your bathroom.

More evil genius, straight from the bent minds at Evil Avatar, here’s how to remove ICQ Ads:

Delete the following .dll files in your /ICQ directory:

icqateima32.dll (removes advertisement downloading)

icqateimg32.dll (removes the loading of images)
icqateres.dll (removes part of the advertisement function)

This should make ICQ run a little faster, but the missing ads make ICQ a little uglier.

BlogFinder is a nice little Google-based search engine that indexes all the weblogs –as if you haven’t guessed that already.

A special fork-in-the-eye for whichever nimrod that signed me up for CrushSuck. It sounds nice, at first, and only after running the gauntlet of their signup procedure do you realize that it’s a cleverly disguised spam-harvester.

That’s ok; if I notice any increase in spam, or I don’t get confirmation of their removal of my email address, I’ll have Rackspace halt their service due to violation of TOS.

Yeah, more embarrassment for me: I’ve recently grown this terrible affinity for SCOTS: Southern Culture on the Skids.

Couple the manic riffs of psychobilly punk with the homey romance of microwaved meals and trailer parks, and you’re really close to the sounds I’m talking about. Of course, then you have to take a sharp left at Pumpkin Center, Alabama, drive through forty miles of dirt roads, and bash your head with bricks a few times.

Articles like this piss me off.

It’s quite obvious to me, someone who can’t even claim that he knows anything about webdesign, that Valerie Casey is merely diddling on Jakob Nielsen’s name so that she can grab some of his spotlight. I’m almost suprised that she didn’t add how FreeBSD rules, Slashdot sucks, Microsoft is the devil, and how she was so much more three-one-three-three-seven than all of us because she hacked a Gibson.

Free monkeys for everyone!

Hey, remember that song that goes … well, kinda like this? [Hums]. If you don’t you can use this new software. Hum the tune to your computer, and the software extracts pitch and timing data and searches a database for possible matching songs.

When you get a bunch of geeks together for a weekend of gaming and debauchery, you usually end up with some pretty terrifying memetic results.

This weekend’s new concepts:

• Wood Blinds: I noticed a sign, while driving through Atlanta, that said “Wood Blinds.” At first I thought, “Advertisement for window coverings.” Then I thought, hey, what if this is really a public service announcement, as in “Drugs Kill” ? Maybe these people are trying to do us a favor: Wood blinds! I relayed this epiphany to the group, and they concurred that there were many ways that wood could blind. Splinters, flying sticks, and even chopsticks can rob hapless children of their sight. Remember, kids: Wood Blinds.
  • Kayvan: Kayvan’s name sounds like a unit of measurement. “Captain, the Amphilons are at 3500 Kayvans and closing!” We’re not sure, but we think that Kayvan is about six feet tall. If Kayvan is six feet tall, how far away is Huntsville from Atlanta, in Kayvans? Answer: a little over two Megavans, which is a bunch of Kayvans. And you know what to do with a buncha Kayvans.