Yes some crazy PC stuff, but this is not Comdex, that show died. this show just kills you. Assuming i ever do this show again i will spend much more time choosing some really really good walking shoes than anything else. Only Device i saw that was running linux was the Nokia N800, i loved the industrial design. It had a seriously sick popout camera and the form factor was very nice too. I did not see if it had IR, if it does, this would make the sickest home remote control system. I have to admit it was kind of a time warp effect that stopped me dead to hear the Term "Internet Appliance" again. I have posted the few pics i took up in the Gallery. I did see one thing there i would love to have, it was a 16 Gig USB drive that looks more like a Zippo lighter. Very cool.

So here it is people, the ULTIMATE HOME on the bay, or at least my Dream Home if you will, here is part of their description from their website. It consists of five levels connected by a spiral staircase. The top level is 5.6 metres above the sea level and has been kept for study rooms. The next lower level is situated at 3.5 metres above the sea level and contains the night time zone while the next lower level at 1.4 metres contains the daytime zone with a kitchen and bathrooms. The lowest living level at 0.8 metres above the sea level is semi-submerged and has been kept for the guest room, bathroom and technical spaces.

Once i did get it back Customs had rifled through and now much of my stuff is now missing, My GPS is gone, so are my keys (no time to pack so they ended up in the wrong bag, i know but hard to pack in 5 minutes)My ugg slippers are gone and so is a glass container with Rye Ergot that cost me 100 franks=120 US dollars. This little war on terrorism just cost me about a grand in missing stuff, Thanks US Customs Services. ya thieving bastards. I had not had adequate time to pack my stuff in Switzerland cause we got locked out of where i was staying so i ended up sleeping on the floor in the hallway outside of my friends apartment.

All in All it was an incredible trip, i did make it to the Gil Goa Party in Basel but didnt make it to see Banco De Gaia. What an incredible party it was too.

The party was a fund raiser for the Marijuana Policy Project but from where i was sitting it might as well have been sponsored by the Long Island Iced tea Initiative. One thing i walk away with which in my hazy state of mentality is this there is Digital and there is the real Analog world. Yes i got to meet real playboy bunnies and damn Dupont must be proud cause those things were just a tad smaller than the blimp.

I have seen a few fake tits but these were unreal. Honestly there was very little about them that was sexy. Trust me there were TONS of gorgeous women there but the fake tits on the one playboy bunny were bad, the blonde chick looked a lot like Pamela Anderson. The things were so huge they had to hurt, lord knows i have seen pimples pop that were under less pressure.

Which brings me to my Digital VS Analog statement. Cameras.

Hell, most people don't even realize they are trapped. As long as there is enough pretty shiny things to look at along the way, one mans trash is another mans treasure, right? It somehow reminds me of the old adage about slow boiling a frog VS dropping one in hot water. Its somehow true if you only pay attention to the water. Wonder what would happen if you tried that with a duck?

Linux on the desktop is irrelevant. That is not to say I don't think it will ever happen, it will, trust me! But is anyone looking at what else is happening along the way?

Of Course they aren't.

Smartphones, Embedded Devices, Supercomputers, Clusters, Grid Computing or The Cloud, call it what you will but its not a duck that much is for sure, after all, its almost all penguin powered.

How can that be you say? what about Apple, obviously its not a penguin but it sure as hell has no relation to a duck that much we can all agree on. Supposedly if you look really close... Like down into the DNA its a not so distant relative to the Penguin, seriously!

I don't really remember the press talking about how Linux would someday BE the whole cloud but the nobody is better than the press is pretty at delivering pipedreams so who knows, maybe I blinked and missed that weeks news.

I am guessing it must have been about the same time they predicted the phone industry would someday become VERY penguin friendly. Its also kind of funny, with the whole apple clan and Emperor Jobs preaching about the FUD effect that all the different Android ancestrial lineages will cause endless confusion as they attempt to keep their bloodlines pure.

Me thinks they have taken all the spoiled apples, turned em into hard cider and are constantly buzzed on their own apple juice. Gee and I thought cults only drank coolaid.

What does this have to do with Lightning? well few in history have been able to make lightning bolts as large as Tesla was doing back in 1920 even today 85 years later and only now are we able to equal his accomplishments. Nothing is more powerful or required in our world of today than energy and other than earthquakes nothing releases as much energy as Lightning does in a matter of seconds. So how about some close up shots of it?

I just remember all these people walking around and him showing me a stack of cards that the computer read. I vaguely remember them dropping them into this bin and the cards getting sucked into the machine one by one from the bottom of the stack and being spit back out someplace else. Clueless as to what any of this meant.

Sad to say but i really had no clue what i was looking at. Even to this day the memory is kind of fuzzy but at least now i can appreciate what i was seeing, i do remember this huge machine with people around it feeding it the stacks of cards

IBM created the worlds first commercially available PC using what they called COTS, common off the shelf components and released it upon the world on August 11th, 1981. I know exactly where i was that day, don't remember what i did but i do remember it.

My first time doing this forced me to find out how to get the darn thing apart, easier said than done.

Once i got it apart i was further stuck because i didn't know which rubber gaskets to change and which to not change, the kit came with 5 new o-rings but the keg itself had many more which left me scratching my head and hitting google to try to find the answer, after hours of searching and finding nothing but one drawing that looked like it had been faxed and copied hundreds of times i realized it might take a bit more work.

In all my keg had 8 gaskets. 5 get changed and 3 are apparently unique to my keg. So here is a bit of a How-To with good pics.