Hard drives are considered pretty boring by most people.  So if you just want to know if it's worth it to buy a SATA 3 drive even if you only have a SATA 2 controller I'll save you some time.  Yes. 

For those intrepid enough to read on here's the hard data.  I tested two Western Digital 640GB Black Editions, one SATA 2 and one SATA 3.  The SATA 3 drive has the added advantage of having twice the cache (64MB vs 32MB) of the SATA 2 version.

I know a lot about a lot of different things.  Everything from astronomy, physics, photography, and information technology.  I'm a jack-of-all-trades type of person. I have a B.S. in Physics with a concentration in Astronomy, so I'm probably qualified to answer a few simple questions here and there. 

Is this thing on?  Hello ...

Here we are, ten years since Y2K.  We've survived a dot com burst, two potentially "funny" elections, quite possibly the worst hurricane to hit the US in a few generations, countless earthquakes on the other side of the pacific, a tsunami or two and a crappy web log written by a graduate student in Boone, NC.  

 I had the opprotuninty to lead the Worldwide Photo Day Event in Boone, NC this weekend.  It was great to have the opprotunity to talk with other photographers in the area. We wandered around the ASU campus, passing Sanford Mall and Durham Park and going down King Street.  The only real eventful moment was an encounter with the town hobo.  

I've never really done a hardware review before and this is far from official, so please forgive any sort of review etiquette I may run a foul of.  
 

This summer I've begun work on my masters' project.  I'll be working on building simulations of certain planetary formation situations using nVidia CUDA.  In particular I'm looking at the formation of "hot Jupiters." There is quite a bit that is still unknown about these things, it was once thought that a planet composed of such light material couldn't form that close to a parent star, hence the ruckus of their discovery.

I picked up an Epson Perfection V500 scanner a few months back for a couple of reasons, mainly the fact that my old CanoScan LiDE 30 had kicked the bucket.   Previously I'd been using a CoolScan 5000 at my university to scan in my Velvia slides and the LiDE 30 only for documents.  As far as dedicated films scanners go it's really nice and it better be for nearly $1000.  But that's a lot to pay and not have the ability to do document scanning and the Nikon software, is well, clunky.  

 I've compiled a guide from various sources on how to install FreeBSD to a ZFS filesystem, the complete guide can be found here:

http://www.one-button.org/drupal/node/98

So far I have this humming along nicely in a VM.  Now if I had a few spare hard drives I could try out some RAID-Z goodies. 

Black and white images are often very striking, relying mostly composition to make their point.  With the advent of digital photography one has to rely on conversion to black and white from color.  The debate rages on whether or not this is "as good' as the old silver based films.  Digital is certainly less messy in terms of developing, it's a lot easier to transfer a few RAW files off a CF card than to drag out the tanks and chemicals. But converting a digital color image to black and white requires the throwing away of information in the image.

Finally got a new layout setup. I decided to make my own Twitter block instead of using the one that comes with the Twitter Drupal module, the layout is a bit bizarre I think (the way it handles @replies). I also managed to setup the Flickr module to update with my latest uploads.