crunch crunch, spark!

I had a dream about this last night, so I thought I'd blog real quick about the phenomena that causes wintergreen mints to spark. I had first done this while camping with my 3rd grade class. We were out in the middle of the woods, when the instructors gave us the candy, and exclaimed to chew with our mouths open and watch our friends. It was pretty amazing back then, and since I have tried to recreate the same effect for my sister, but to no avail. I thought that they had removed what was causing it to spark, but that's not really true. There isn't a particular chemical that's bad for our health, causing it to spark up.
There are 3 things that cause the life saver to spark: sugar, nitrogen, and flavoring. What happens is that when you bight into the candy, you cause sugar molecules to split, releasing positively charged particles across your mouth. When I researched this, I read positively charged electrons, which is all wrong. From what I remember in chem 110, positively charged particles are protons. Electrons are negatively charged. Anyways, the protons interact with nitrogen in your mouth, causing a flash of light invisible to the human eye. This flash of light interacts with the flavoring of the candy, emitting light at a wavelength visible to the human eye. And viola, you have your spark.
For me this experiment never worked when I tried to show my sister. So I have some ideas to help this work for you. Make sure the pack of mints are fresh, for example the ones you get out of the plastic wrappers. If you use an old pack, it could have absorbed some moisture, which takes away from it's ability to emit the light. Secondly make sure you are in a very dark room and have given your eyes time to adjust. Thirdly, you can try grinding your teeth more than biting. Just think about how many protons you'll release by grinding everything to smithereens. ;)

new visa, two way authentication!

So I first read about this on my favorite blog wowinsder(giving credit where it's due ;) ), and i decided to research it a little more in depth. Basically as you see in the pic, there is a keypad, and an lcd screen. From what I understand, the keypad is to enter your password onto the card, that generates a one time use keycode. I'm willing to bet that keycode shows up on screen to be typed in while making online purchases, but hopefully you don't have to in the store. It seems like it would cause things to take a little longer while you wait in line, but if the technology works, it would really boost cred card security. The traditional method goes straight to the visa servers for authentication. With this new visa, your card will be sent to two different servers. One server verifies your visa, the other verifies your key code number. The new visa is being tested in Europe right now, and if it's a success, we can expect it to be offered out at all major companies soon after.
So why was this on my world of warcraft site? Well we use the same technology to secure our online accounts. See we face the danger of having someone hack into our account, and mailing off all of our virtual assets. It is very upsetting to have a game like wow, where you invest a lot of your time, and to log in to see your characters naked and all of your money gone. People hack into your account through key loggers on your computer, that record your keystrokes, like your passwords. This happened to my brother. I myself have an authenticator now, after I seen my computer had been infected by a trojan. I had removed it, but that was a clear reminder that I could easily be hacked.
So far there has yet to be 1 person who's account was hacked while using the authenticator. With the visas, no one can use them without those one time use keys. For that they have to have your visa physically in hand, and they need to know your password just to show the key number.

Engine Bay Drifting!

LoL This was in my email this morning. Other than it looking hella tight, that would have sucked if that car would have caught grip! XD You can click the supplied link, because posting videos will slow down the blog.

http://blog.cardomain.com/2009/05/07/out-of-control-engine-bay-drifting/?cmp_id=EMC-News

The future of money

Check out the picture above. That's an electronic monopoly game! Now before you start dissing the idea of making a classic game all electronic, lets look it's merits. Hazbro could really been on to something, something people have been saying for years. That something is making all money electronic.
Ik you read that last statement, and thought omg noooo. But in all serious nous, it may be both cost productive and beneficial to do that. I think the world is already heading there with most people using credit cards for most of their day to day purchases. I myself hardly carry cash anymore. Ik some people like having that cash there in their hand, but just think about all of that change you have sitting around or bills that have been washed or lost. I remember people who would write their names on their money, just so they could see if it comes back to them in the future. Now think of germs that may be spreading, or try to imagine where that money may have been with it's last handler. Money also uses paper, lots of it. Remember a while back that pennies cost more to make than they were worth, because of the copper. Paper money also has a lot of carbon in them, that doesn't sound very green.
If you look at japan, they already have a system in place where people can pay for things just by swiping their cell phones. Hey where is our system at! Now I know that making everything electronic poses a big security risk. But how much more is it going to cost to develop and maintain a security system for these cards, than to print money. I'm willing to bet it would cost a lot less. So think about money that both the government and the consumer could save. Also think about the better impact on the environment, and with the ease of use.

This is just a thought of mine, but I think we are running on a pretty outdated system, that we are going to be left behind in if we don't step it up.

blog links!!

I've finally succeeded in adding blog links to this blog. I have always wanted blog links, and have spent days researching how to do them. Surprisingly they were easy to do, and right under my nose! I've wanted to implement blog links, because I've noticed that my blog is getting a little full. I have around 24 posts on this site, which amounts to 2.5 pages. I want to reduce the amount of posts to around 6 per page. This way pages load faster. This is going to create more pages to sift through, especially as time goes on and I add more posts. For someone who knows that why want, instead of sifting through hella pages, all they will have to do is use the blog links to find the topic that they want to read. There are 4 topics in my blog links: my life and thoughts, net news, tech help, and blog updates.

I combines all random things and my thoughts in with my life, because they are very closely related. Net news, is random news that I find on the web, as well as actual news, news. Tech help will be any posts that I make describing how to do stuff. For example I may make a post on how to create your very own blog links. ;) Lastly, updates will contain all of the posts like this one, where I describe new things I have added.

Clare Werbeloff

For anyone who doesn't recognize this lady, she "witnessed" a shooting outside of a nightclub in Australia. In racist terms she described a fat guy shooting a skinny guy. Basically the fat guy shot the skinny one for sleeping with his cousin. Her depiction of what happened has been posted all over youtube, and her famous quote, "chk chk boom", has spawned a lot of t-shirts. She's also very hot, and with that accent, she rose to instant internet fame. As soon as she was widely known, she hired a PR agent, and started her own fan club. The kicker of the story.. it was all fake! She made the story up for the news cameras, and says she didn't expect it to get blown up like it did. Although she sure did want all of the camera time, considering she was trying to kick other people off the camera! LoL .
Rumor has it, that she wants to start stripping at one of the nightclubs. Now this is just a rumor, and this is the internet. It's not hard for one "hot" girl rise to fame, and all of a sudden become a "stripper." Although if she were to become a stripper, she'd probably bring a lot of client ale, thanks to her internet fame.

blogs and bosses, plus motivation to exercise

Well some of you are looking at the above image and thinking.. kawaii!! or your thinking, why the hell did you put this one up. Can you believe I found this picture by searching boss and cartoon, on google. This pic is totally unrelated to the two, well it isn't if you don't have a dirty mind!
This pic goes along with two things I wanted to talk about. The first being what the hell this pic is from. This pic is from (drum roll!), an anime exercising video! LoL, yes you read that right. This video is called Issho ni Training, or in other words, Training with Hinako. In this video, you watch Hinako doing various sorts of exercises. At the same time she does her exercises, you do the same thing. Now all of the otaku lovers out there, can do push ups while watching Hinakos boobs bounce. Yes her boobs bounce while she works out, and the camera is at all of the provocative angles while she exercises. Now before you diss this video, I must say that it made amazons #1 best seller list the week of release. The link can be found here http://www.amazon.co.jp/いっしょにとれーにんぐ-DVD-鈴木行/dp/B0025MGLTA/ref=pd_ts_d_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd

My original intent for this post was not to talk about Hinako (but it was very interesting); it was actually to talk about blogging and it's effect on future employment. This is pretty much old news, but I wanted to blog about it real quick. Basically all of todays youth, up to people in their mid 20's, have been a big part of web 2.0 . Yes web 2.0, you here that term everywhere now. Now that term has nothing to do about the speed of the web. It has to do with all of the social networking sites, and the ease of sharing different types of information with peers and people all across the globe. Everyone now has some sort of social networking site, and it's even expanded to older generations. The problem here is that some companies are using these social sites, to evaluate potential employees. This causes a huge debate on whether employers should judge your employment off of what they find on your blog. You can't really say it's a breach of privacy, I mean you did post your info on the web for millions to see. The problem here is more moral than anything. So now we have to look at who is more morally right, the employer, or the employee. Personally I think the employer should stay off of peoples blogs and social sites. Most people are totally different off the job than on it. Although I'm sure from the employers perspective, that it can really help at times with per say someone who has drug problems. But come on, there are other ways than spying on their social life, to find that out. So if your my employer, leave my blog now! haha..well you don't have to, but don't judge my work performance off what you find here. More than likely.. 99.99% of what's on here is not related to work.

Going back to Hinako, if you'd like to join her for some exercises, here is the youtube link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FeF3hRDzj8&feature=player_embedded

Monterey Bay 2

Ok, this update is going to be a little short and sweet. I just finished watching the Zodiac, and it's already 1:30 in the morning... I'm waking up at 9 to get a move on and get out of here early. So today was the aquarium trip, and it was hella tight. We spent like 5 hours going through that aquarium, and we were draggin heels by the time we left there. We brought Erica's Nikon, and she made me take all of the pictures. Well that was a mistake. I'm willing to bet I drove her crazy,every time I would stop at a fish tank to take like a zillion photographs. I kept finding little areas in the photos that would be underdeveloped or overdeveloped, and I wanted to get the right settings to rectify that. Although drove me crazy with all the people using flash on their cameras. I was like damn don't you see that white light ruining your photo. A couple of times it ruined a really nice shot I had. I blame all of that on my class, now I can't curse the camera when a photo comes out wrong.

The aquarium was pretty much the highlight of the day. We came back to the room to rest, before heading back to Cannery Row, for one more night of hot chocolate next to the water. So anyways I should call it so I can get some sleep. Most of my photos from the trip are on my flickr account, but I'll post a couple here that were my favorites. Oh and a little trivia, the water right in this cove..if drained out.. is deeper than the grand canyon. That pretty interesting when you think of all the stuff that lives down there. Although one word comes to my mind, sharks!