Ten Thoughts to Ponder for 2006

Number 10
Life is sexually transmitted.

Number 9
Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one Can die.

Number 8
Men have two emotions: Hungry and Horny. If you see us without an erection, make us a sandwich.

Number 7
Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach a person to use the Internet and they won't bother you for weeks.

Number 6
Some people are like a Slinky... not really good for anything, but you still can't help but smile when you shove them down the stairs.

Number 5
Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday,lying in hospitals dying of nothing.

Number 4
All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.

Number 3
Why does a slight tax increase cost you two hundred dollars and a substantial tax cut saves you thirty cents?

Number 2
In the 60s, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.

AND THE NUMBER 1 THOUGHT FOR 2006:
We know exactly where one cow with Mad-cow-disease is located among the millions and millions of cows in America but we haven't got a clue as to where thousands of illegal immigrants or terrorists are located. Maybe we should put the Department of Agriculture in charge of Immigration or Homeland Security.

The Price of Children

We've repeatedly seen the breakdown of the cost of raising a child. The government recently calculated the cost of raising a child from birth to 18 and came up with $160,140 for a middle income family. Talk about sticker shock! That doesn't even touch college tuition. But $160,140 isn't so bad if you break it down. It translates into: $8,896.66 a year, $741.38 a month or $171.08 a week. That's a mere $24.24 a day, and just over a dollar an hour! Still, you might think the best financial advice is to not have children if you want to be "rich".

Actually, it is just the opposite.

What do you get for your $160,140?

Naming rights. First, middle and last!

Glimpses of God every day

Giggles under the covers every night

More love than your heart can hold

Butterfly kisses and Velcro hugs

Endless wonder over rocks, ants, clouds, & warm cookies

A hand to hold, usually covered with jelly or chocolate

A partner for blowing bubbles, flying kites, building sand castles, and skipping down the sidewalk in the pouring rain

Someone to laugh yourself silly with, no matter what the boss said or how your stocks performed that day

For $160,140, you never have to grow up. You get to:

Finger-paint

Carve pumpkins

Play hide-and-seek

Catch lightning bugs

Never stop believing in Santa Claus

You have an excuse to:

Keep reading the Adventures of Piglet and Pooh

Watch Saturday morning cartoons

Go to Disney movies

Wish on stars

You get to frame rainbows, hearts, and flowers under refrigerator magnets and collect spray painted noodle wreaths for Christmas, handprints set in clay for Mother's Day, and cards with backward letters for Father's Day. For $160,140, there is no greater bang for your buck. You get to be a hero just for:

Retrieving a Frisbee off the garage roof

Taking the training wheels off a bike

Removing a splinter

Filling a wading pool

Coaxing a wad of gum out of bangs

Coaching a baseball team that never wins but always gets treated to ice cream regardless

You get a front row seat to history to witness the:

First step

First word

First bra

First date

First time behind the wheel!

You get to be immortal. You get another branch added to your family tree, and if you're lucky, a long list of limbs in your obituary called grandchildren and great grandchildren. You get an education in psychology, nursing, criminal justice, communications, and human sexuality that no college can match. In the eyes of a child, you rank right up there under God. You have all the power to heal a boo-boo, scare away the monsters under the bed, patch a broken heart, police a slumber party, ground them forever, and love them without limits, so one day they will, like you, love without counting the cost.

That's quite a deal for the price!

Love & enjoy your children & grandchildren.

Guess What I'm Lookin' At Right Now...

A Dell UltraSharp 2005FPW 20.1-inch Wide Aspect Flat Panel LCD Monitor. Oh yeah. It's pretty sweet.

Quad-SLI PC

NVIDIA and Dell unveiled the first-ever Quad-SLI PC at CES this year. Taking its acclaimed SLI technology to the next level, NVIDIA introduced support for not one, not two, not three, but FOUR GPUs.

Delivering the most extreme high definition gaming experience available on the PC, Quad SLI features four of NVIDIA's flagship GeForce® 7800 GTX GPUs with an NVIDIA nForce®4 SLI motherboard.

Imagine tearing through today's most advanced PC games with an unheard of 41 gigapixels per second of raw graphics performance, 5.2 teraflops of compute power, 96 pixel pipes, and an astounding 2 GB of on-board graphics memory. Nothing can stop you when you have this kind of hardware on your side.

Now imagine yourself doing all of this at extreme HD resolutions with everything turned on.

A Quad-SLI PC lets you run your favorite games at an unbelievably high resolution of 2560x1600 while maintaining silky smooth frame rates. In addition, support for a new 32x antialiasing mode and 16x anisotropic filtering enables stunning visuals.

Wow. Just... wow. Tom's Hardware has a run-up as well.

Thanks to the PCI Express (PCIe) interface, combining two graphics cards in an SLI configuration is easily achieved. Just plug two identical GeForce 6 or GeForce 7 cards into the motherboard, and connect them with the SLI bridge connector. The two cards will then split the 3D rendering load between them, which can result in a performance improvement of up to 70 percent in everyday life. Now that PCI Express motherboards are available with PCIe x32 - or, more correctly, two x16 slots - there are also some new and intriguing possibilities.

Mere words simply cannot describe the emotions... combine all that with the new Dell 30 inch 3007WFP LCD panel... 'scuse me, I have some drool to clean off my keyboard...

EDIT: Some coverage from Slashdot as well.

Today at the Consumer Electronics Show, Dell and NVIDIA announced a new XPS system coming later this year that will sport not one, not two, but FOUR GeForce 7800 GTX 512 GPUs running in a quad-SLI configuration. There are two physical graphics cards in the system still, but each has two seperate PCBs with a GPU and 512 MB of memory on each. PC Perspective has some information including pictures of the cards and Dell system as well as specs and details on how NVIDIA handles the new SLI data configurations. No word yet on power consumption and heat levels, of course.

OEM Hard Drive With Window

Oooh, saw this on Slashdot and knew I had to jot it down, gotta stick this in my next wish list... w00t!!!

At last, you don't need to mess around with Dremel tools and Lexan (and destroy your valuable data) to get a clear window in your hard drive. Western Digital has released the Raptor X 150GB SATA hard drive. 10,000 RPM, 4.6ms seek time, 16MB buffer, and, yes, a clear window so you can see what's going on inside. Made out of a special polycarbonate lens with an ESD-dissipative coating, the lens is designed to let case modders and their groupies see the drive platters and heads without sacrificing data integrity.

Great googly moogly, can you imagine a pair of these beauties in a RAID0 configuration? Can we say SMOKIN'??

What Would You Do For A Flying Car?

Far too funny to describe. You have to watch it. Do it now. Right now.

Milestones and Trends in Renewable Energy

More fun reading from Slashdot, with some reflections and projections: The year 2005 saw large wind power installments come into a price range where they are now competitive with traditional grid prices. 2006 could see several solar designs do the same. Cold fusion was boosted with two, concurrent and independent sonofusion breakthroughs, though the stigma in the name is still deeply seated. 2006 could see floating wind turbines arrive on the commercial scene -- floating in the water like oil rigs, or floating high in the air, courtesy of helium. 2006 will see at least three companies offering after-market kits for adding Brown's gas (H and O from electrolysis, common ducted) to the air intake of vehicles for enhanced mileage and performance. Many other fuel economizing systems are slated to mature in the marketplace. Climate change evidence will continue to mount. It will yet be years before we harness lightning, but stable tornado systems prototypes that tap waste heat from power plants could arrive this coming year. Will 2006 be the year that clean energy becomes more the vogue than cool computer gadgets?

Coffin Hotels Opening Near You

Saw this on Slashdot, a CNN article entitled "Goodbye mini bar, hello mini room" about a new style of shadowrunner-style hotels opening around London airports.

Costing roughly 70 dollars a night (but also bookable for four-hour periods), the rooms are aimed at passengers waiting for connections or those who want to sleep or work before a meeting.

Each soundproof cabin will contain a sofa that converts into a double bed, a pull down desk, closet space, adjustable mood lighting, a shower, wireless Internet, an iPod connection and a flat-screen TV.

Reminds me of something out of a William Gibson novel.

But, like their easyHotel rivals, Yotel rooms may seem a little claustrophobic, with no natural lighting -- a concern that Woodroffe says is likely to be offset by the quality of the product.

For approximately $70 a night (also with an hourly rate for layover passengers) you get a 10-square-meter room with no natural light but with some very cyberpunkish features... now if I can just get a node to jack in my cybernetic implant whilst staying there...