Hurray For Drug Tests, RSS, Halo, and Steven King!

I get to take a drug test in an hour or two for my next client. Hurray!

Satirical statements aside, here are some random interesting links and articles I have accumulated over the past week or so.

• WiFi Umbrella - From a common sense point of view, this one is pretty ridiculous. If you want to know the forecast but don't have the time to type in http://weather.com, change the TV channel to your local weather stations, and can't spare the time to look outside and think ... maybe you deserve to be wet. From a tech perspective, its kinda cool. The company also offers small dev. chip sets you can embed in your own devices so that they can be internet aware which is kinda cool. Hurray for internet toasters!
• Photo-Mosaic Mirrors - Pretty sweet concept. I have been thinking about my own photo-mosaic project a fair bit lately and may start in on it again soon. Its one I would really like to finish or get to a decent stopping point.
• Wind Powered Lights - I am not 100% I haven't posted about this before but I really like this idea. So much so that I originally had a similar idea back when I was driving back and forth to UD every holiday. I thought that all wind from the cars and trucks driving on t he interstates could probably power lights along the highway. Another miss opportunity ;).
• Coder or Cannibal - This was a fun little test back several months ago. Em got a kick out of it.
• Flip Video Camera - This looks like a great way to be able to take digital video on the cheap. Most digital cameras today can take a limited amount of video but it would be nice to have something that could take longer shots without costing an arm and a leg. Something like this would be great on a vacation assuming you had a laptop to download the video to periodically during the day or at night.
  

I have been using Google Reader for a few months now and love it ... but I have a problem.

Hi, my name is Ben and I am a starred RSS feed addict. [Hi Ben!]

Over that time I read countless articles from all of my subscriptions but ended up starring 600+ more that I wanted to read or thought looked interesting but didn't have the time or interest to read then. Well this past week (while in Cinci without a wife and much else to do but play Halo and work) I have been attempting to go through my many starred articles and turn over a new leaf of only starring articles I truly want to read later ... and actually following through. I have un-starred a couple hundred in that time and have read a large chunk of those ... but there are always more!

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Other than reading articles, lately I have been spending my free time doing a whole lot of nothing productive. Mostly watching TV, talking or playing Halo (we have another company game night next week, I had to refresh my skills ;) ).

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On an up-note, a coworker of mine brought to my attention some very serious news that I was not aware of. Evidently, Steven King has worked with Marvel to bring several stories from his Dark Tower series to life in comic book form - The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born. The coworker is a collector of comic books and had read the first 5 (there will be 7) and said that he loved them (despite having not read the books) and that the 6th was coming out on July 4th. Thats not all, he also offered to seek out copies of all the books for me if I would pay him for them. Indeed I would, and indeed I did. I am now the proud owner of the first 6 and I have to say there are great!

The illustrations are fantastic. The majority of the stories are taken right from the book but focus on the early life of Roland. There are some liberties taken on the order of events or exact details as compared to what I remember of the books but its flows well and is a nice addition to the series. From what I have read there is some "new" material in the comic book series but I haven't gotten to anything big new (just a few details that might not have been in the originals but hinted at). Overall I am very pleased. I got through 2 last night (it takes a surprisingly long time to read them and look at all of the pics) hopefully another couple are on tonight's agenda.