Driving to Colorado

Posted by nitrogen on February 17th, 2010

On January 18, 2010 I set off to drive from Michigan to Colorado.  Along the way, when it was safe to do so, I snapped a few pictures.
Unfortunately, most of what I saw were trees.  I-80 is kind of boring, and I had a lot of fog to contend with the first day.  But the [...]

Colorado

Posted by nitrogen on February 12th, 2010

Scenic pictures of Colorado, because I still think the mountains are awesome.

Holiday Trivia

Posted by nitrogen on December 5th, 2009

Santa Claus’ reindeer first appeared in an 1823 poem A Visit from St. Nicholas (a.k.a. The Night Before Christmas or ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas) by Clement Clark Moore. In it, they were named Dasher and Dancer, Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid, and Dunder and Blixem.
Dunder and Blixem were never part of the [...]

The Most Impossible Places To Live on the Planet

Posted by nitrogen on September 2nd, 2009

Popular Mechanics wrote an article of the Most Dangerous Places To Live on the Planet. But I figured I could still take it one step further.
Got another suggestion? Comment!
(All images lovingly sourced from Wikimedia Commons.)

Advances in Science

Posted by nitrogen on August 14th, 2009

I thought I would take a few minutes to talk about some of the recent scientific/medical advances I’ve heard about lately and thought were cool. I hope these come to fruition.
MGAT2: The Fat Gene?
I read a story today about a scientists discovering a gene, MGAT2, that controls how mice process fat. Flipping [...]

Reasons Telsa is Cool:
Thomas Edison verbally offered Tesla $50,000 (a huge amount at the time) to improve his Direct Current efficiency. When Tesla actually did it, Edison refused to pay up, claiming he had been joking around. Tesla responded by quitting and inventing Alternating Current, which was much more efficient for long distances. [...]

Apple Security House Of Cards About To Fall?

Posted by nitrogen on April 28th, 2009

For years Apple Computer users have enjoyed a sense of security and invulnerability to malware and viruses that has not been had by PC users for the greater part of a decade. In fact, Apple as a company is so comfortable with this position that much of their marketing focuses on it (e.g. the [...]

Let’s Go Motoring

Posted by nitrogen on February 2nd, 2009

Being that it’s the middle of winter and I’m growing continually more antsy for good weather again, I figured I’d write a bit about a couple of my summer toys.

1974 Yamaha RD250 – 247cc 2-stroke twin. 30hp, 330lb, 50mpg, 95mph (according to http://www.yamaha-rd.com/rd/data.html). This one’s special because my dad bought it new for [...]

Windows 7 = Awesome

Posted by nitrogen on January 15th, 2009

Technically speaking, Windows 7 could be named “Windows Vista R2″, correlating with its version number of 6.1. (Likewise, Windows XP, Vista’s predecessor that many people refuse to let go of, could have been deemed Windows 2000 R2, being version 5.1.) Vista’s gotten a bad rap, and I think we can partly thank Apple’s [...]

Driving In The Snow In Michigan

Posted by nitrogen on January 13th, 2009

Allow me to make one distinction before I launch into this: I like the snow. But I hate the cold. I’d also like to note that my complaints are directed toward the lower peninsula of Michigan; if the U.P. knows how to do one thing well, it’s handle the snow.
So we’ve been [...]

Hardware Video Acceleration Is A PITA

Posted by nitrogen on January 4th, 2009

When it comes to outputting HD content from a PC to an HDTV, it can actually take a surprising amount of horsepower to decode and display such a large amount of data (1080p amounts to 124.416 megapixels per second of raw data). This can bring an aging media center to its knees rather quickly.
ATI [...]

Fate Of The Big Three?

Posted by nitrogen on December 18th, 2008

There has been much discussion, controversy, and worry surrounding the Big Three recently. Chrysler, General Motors, and Ford have been lobbying to get a bailout amounting to $15 billion from the government. Should we give it to them? I’m very much torn on my opinion of this.
On one hand, I have a [...]

The FailMeter

Posted by nitrogen on October 16th, 2008

I thought this was funny. I parked in this spot in Mount Pleasant last weekend during Homecoming.

Photo Gallery Accessible Again

Posted by nitrogen on September 15th, 2008

I removed the code that integrates with the WordPress User Database, so at least it works again.

Photo Gallery Currently Inaccessible

Posted by nitrogen on August 24th, 2008

WordPress made a change in the 2.6 update that significantly changed the authentication system. Unfortunately, this completely broke the code I wrote that piggybacks on that authentication for my picture gallery. So, for the time being, until I find a good solution, the photo gallery is not accessible.
Edit: For the time being, [...]

New Pictures: MTU Winter Carnival

Posted by nitrogen on February 17th, 2007

Last weekend, Jeff and I went up to Michigan Tech in Houghton to visit Tom for Winter Carnival. Despite frigid temperatures and extremely long drives, we made it there and back in one piece (or, at least, the same amount of individual pieces as we departed with), and had a good bit of fun [...]

LiquidNitrogen.us Registration Instructions

Posted by nitrogen on February 6th, 2007

I?ve noticed several people have had trouble with the registration process for my site. So, I wanted to provide a set of step-by-step instructions to make things easier. There are basically three stages with a few steps in each.
—–STAGE 1—–
1. Go to http://liquidnitrogen.us and click the |Photo Gallery| link.
2. [...]

Minor site problems

Posted by nitrogen on January 24th, 2007

I’ve upgraded WordPress to the recently-released 2.10 version. For the most part, things went smoothly, but the theme I had been using did fail the test of compatibility. Until I can find a solution, or the author releases an updated version, the WordPress back-end will be running an alternative theme. Unfortunately, this [...]

Site Visual Updates

Posted by nitrogen on November 25th, 2006

In a visual sense, what you’re looking at now is already version 2.0 of the site. I was not quite content with the all-black look I’d come up with first of all, and started to really like the WordPress theme (WuCoco by Mike Lococo) that I’d settled on for the back-end. So, I [...]

Photo Gallery Changes

Posted by nitrogen on November 22nd, 2006

I finally figured out how to integrate the user-management system from WordPress into the photo gallery. (It was a royal pain–for more information, check out the Project post for this site.) So, now, you have to register to view the pictures. Yes, it’s an inconvenience, but you only have to do it [...]

Site Construction

Posted by nitrogen on November 10th, 2006

Site construction is going well, so far. The domain was registered two days ago, and I got some basic things working, like Wordpress and SPGM. I designed the main page yesterday in Photoshop. Today I sliced everything and exported it in ImageReady and fought with PHP for a while until it would [...]

The Beginning

Posted by nitrogen on November 10th, 2006

Welcome to the site. Herein lies a cacophony of things I feel are worth sharing with others. That includes a selection of pictures, pictures and descriptions of some projects that I’ve worked on, my resume, and info about myself. If you’re here, you probably already know why, so enjoy.