Stephen’s Untold Stories

Well, spring training is about to start. For those of you who are unaware, my favorite teams are the Oakland A’s and the Atlanta Braves. Here’s a funny comic about the A’s.

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One of our favorite educators web has put together a great posting on her blog. Kathy Schrock always does some of the best stuff you will find anywhere!

Brief overview of K-12 podcasting

Here is the latest one.

And you can see the entire collection here. 

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This is one of the most incredible videos I’ve ever seen.

On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur.

No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.

The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way upreal one-way streets.

Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and thefilm went underground until a DVD release a few years ago.

Link to video (has sound)

I’ve been using Skype for a couple of months now, and I am very impressed with it. I used it to talk to a colleague in Hawaii the other day, and the quality was almost perfect. This device lets you free yourself from the computer with Skype.

Skype, the program for making online phone calls, generally requires users to be tethered to a computer and an Internet connection. The VoSKY Call Center changes that equation, adding some interesting new options to the mix.

The Call Center, which costs $69.95 and is available at VoSKY’s Web site, www.vosky.com, works with an Internet-connected Windows PC. When you attach an ordinary landline phone, you can use it to make calls to regular phones over the Internet at a reduced rate using the SkypeOut service, or make calls directly to other online Skype users, a free service.

The system can also forward incoming Skype calls to other phones — including mobile phones — and notify you when a specified Skype user appears online by ringing your phone.

Link to article

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Another reason for me to want to move to the Bay Area.

Google Inc. is joining EarthLink Inc. in a bid to build a wireless network in San Francisco that would offer basic Internet access for free and charge about $20 per month to surf the Web at higher speeds.

The partnership, revealed late Tuesday night, represents the first time that Google has acknowledged it wants help in its quest to provide free wireless, or Wi-Fi, service throughout San Francisco, where the hills could make reliable Internet connections more difficult.

Google, which runs the Internet’s leading search engine, and EarthLink, a major Internet service provider, had been bidding against each other but recently decided it made more sense to team up.

Link to article 

Here is an online spreadsheet. It looks pretty nice, but I haven’t been able to try it yet. Let me know how it works if you get a chance.

iRows Online Spreadsheet 

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I’m not really sure why anyone really would need to see this, but here it is.

Pi to a million places

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I’ll just let you make up your own jokes for this one.

City officials are hoping to harness the power of dog doo. San Franciscans already recycle more than 60 percent of their garbage, but in this dog-friendly town, animal feces make up nearly 4 percent of residential waste, or 6,500 tons a year nearly as much as disposable diapers, according to the city.

Within the next few months, Norcal Waste, a garbage hauling company that collects San Francisco’s trash, will begin a pilot program under which it will use biodegradable bags and dog-waste carts to pick up droppings at a popular dog park.

The droppings will be tossed into a contraption called a methane digester, which is basically a tank in which bacteria feed on feces for weeks to create methane gas.

The methane could then be piped directly to a gas stove, heater, turbine or anything else powered by natural gas. It can also be used to generate electricity.

Link to article 

I guess Mac users need to get used to the idea of online threats. Sad, indeed.

Security and anti-virus companies issued advisories Feb. 21 about a dangerous new hole in the Safari browser that could enable attackers to install malicious code on Apple OS X systems without any user interaction.

The warnings follow news of a slew of malicious code for OS X in the last week, including new worms known as “Leap” and “Ingtana.”

The new threats may change the way that some Internet users, especially those on the Mac platform, view security, said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at anti-virus company Sophos PLC in the United Kingdom.

The Safari Web browser flaw is in a feature called Open Safe Files that is enabled by default.

That feature allows files such as ZIP archives and movie files to be opened and viewed automatically.

Link to article 

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But the Google logo for today is pretty cool.

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The Atlanta airport is adding a 5th runway. The first photo is detail of the new runway. It crosses I-285. The second photo is the entire aiport.

No, I didn’t take these myself.

Click here for larger version

Click here for larger version

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One of the best sports announcers ever. He will be missed.

I just found out today that he has a State Park named after him in his native Wyoming.

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If you don’t live in the south, you may not be able to appreciate this. Waffle House is an institution down here, and I just heard on the radio that they will start taking credit cards by the end of March. They’ve been around 51 years, and this is something I’ve been longing for. I mean, sometimes you just don’t have enough cash to pay for your hashbrowns (scattered, smothered, and covered) at 4:00 am!

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