MIT is open-sourcing their course materials . FAQ is here .

According to the most recent unsolicited email in my inbox, I can buy an acre of the moon for $29.99.

This makes me think: For a few thousand dollars, I can buy adjoining acres across Mare Vaporum, rig them with floodlights, and use the moon as a PDA screen. With each acre as a pixel that would be…lessee… 320×240… 76800 acres, times $29.99…

$2,303,232.

Okay, a little more that a few thousand dollars. But think of the possibilities!

320 x 240 is roughly the resolution of a television.
A square acre is roughly 208.7 feet on a side.
208.7×320 = 66,784 feet, divided by 5280 =~12.65 miles by 8.4 miles.
The moon is ~238,000 miles away…

Hmm… I may need to use a telescope. And at ~186,000 miles per second, radio/light waves takes a second and a half to get there, and a second and a half to get back.

Now: the moon is 2,162 miles in diameter, so my PDA screen will be roughly .55% of its visible width. Atmospheric disturbance aside, it will be visible – sans-telescope – as a flickering point of light just north of center. Visibility will be bad during the full moon and great during the new moon.

I am hereby taking orders for advertising time on my Lunar PDA. The current rate is $1,000,000 per second. However, if you want to upload and run a game, you may do so for free. Imagine: Lunar Lander on the moon.

I need to get out more.

7:15 am
Arrive at work. Witness a train engineer, who’s train engine has been parked in by two SUVs, screaming at the owners of said SUVs. Owners are talking on their cellular phones while drinking expensive bottled water. Ready camera in case said engineer decides to use his vehicle to return the SUVs to the Hell from whence they came.

7:20 am
Dive into, in no particular order, email, code, and coffee. Last-second critical content changes for site which is supposed to launch at 8:00am have not yet arrived. Check news.

8:00 am
Last minute changes still not in. Website not ready to launch. Contemplate launching the damn website anyway. Client said “by 8:00 California time”. Boss says “by 8:00 Michigan time”. 8:00am Michigan time is 5:00am California time. Perhaps California, in the grip of nostalgia because of East Coast blackouts, is having a blackout.

8:30 am
Enjoy the sunrise.

9:00 am
Launch the damn website.

9:10 am
Realize that the contact form is still sending info to my email. Correct the problem.

10:00 am
7:00 am California time. Don’t expect to hear anything for at least two hours. Drink coffee.

10:45 am
Hear that there may be rolling brownouts here in Grand Rapids in order to feed some electricity to the East side of the state. Non-essential businesses are being asked to shut down for the day. What could be less essential than a web developer? Maybe I get to go home early.

That was the temperature of Lake Michigan at Tunnel Park as of yesterday evening at 7:00pm. Swimming was a long, slow kick in the nutz.

The Flash Photo Album is nearing completion. 12k of Actionscript, compiled into a 3k .swf file. When I am satisfied with it I will upload a hundred or so Alaska photos. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow.

This morning I woke to the sound of a mouse in a trap. The poor little feller was trapped by his left front leg, up near the shoulder. He had been trying to gnaw himself free for some time, but couldn’t quite reach far enough to complete the job.

So I fed him to a stray cat.

I hate mice.

But not as much as I hate Internet Explorer 5.

Today I began a re-build of the Flash Photo Album application, with an eye on using it as a CDROM presentation tool, among other things. So not much in the way of new and interesting stuff.

This is a sea otter we woke up in Prince William Sound during a glacier cruise:

Sea otters have the densest fur of any animal. The average human head has 100,000 hair follicles. There are 300,000 hairs in a single square inch of sea otter pelt. Sea otters do not have blubber, but instead, when cleaning themselves, blow air into their fur, where it is trapped and acts as insulation.

Boy, sorting through hundreds of photos takes more time than you would think.

It is official: Though the last two years have been wondrous fun, and I may have the most well-located apartment in the city, it is time to move on. Somewhere around the end of the month I will be moving three blocks to a house on a quieter street. Perhaps then, finally, my time will be a little more my own.

Nah, who am I kidding? That will never happen.

After being up for 40 hours, I slept for twelve. I was initially, as the song says, too tired to sleep, but Daredevil put me out like a light.

So: Alaska. Amazing place. We had, apparently, unusually good weather for this time of year; 60s and sunny in Fairbanks and Denali, 70s and partly cloudy in Anchorage.

Thunderstorm’s a’brewin, so I need to unplug. I will continue after the weather clears. In the meantime, look at this:

And Boy, are my arms tired!

I’m off for ten days in a cabin in the Denali National Park in Alaska. See ya when I see ya!