It's that time again, that time when I remind you (or tell you for the first time) about Folding@Home. What dat is?, you say.
Folding@Home is a distributed computing project managed by Stanford University, the client program runs on your computer (most major OS's supported) and uses your "spare" computing time to help calculate complex mathmateical formulas. When you're not using your computer at 100%, this client will throttle itslf to use the leftover computing power.

Protein sythesis is a predicable system in which proteins are made by folding upon itself, thereby changing it's shape, and thus it's funciton. Each protein serves some purpose and the shape of the protein determines that purpose. By using a complex mathematical formula, biologists can find out how proteins are made. The problem is that this math formula takes a great deal of computing power. By combining our computing efforts, the aggregate power produced is able to accomplish this feat very quickly and is much cheaper for Standford, and thus the medical community.
Why do I care? It's a great way to show off computing power, or show off team-assembled computing power. I am a member of the SAGoons team, in which my personal computations are also counted in the team overall score to demonstrate how many computations SomethingAwful members have contributed, and to see how your team stacks up against other teams.

More info can be found at folding.stanford.edu. Enter a unique username, and join the SAGoons (Team 150). It's fun to watch your own progress.

With my hometown about to get pwn3d by Hurricane Rita, I was just thinking yesterday that R is getting close to the end of the alphabet that is used by the National Hurricane Center to name hurricanes and tropical storms. Over at LiveScience there is an article about what happens when we run out of hurricane names for a given season.

From the article I learned that the letters Q, U, X, Y, and Z are not used for selecting names, with no explanation of why. It is interesting to note that the most active storm season to date has produced 21 storms, which is exactly how many names are selected for use in a given season - and we're getting close to the threshhold.

Meanwhile, some are trying to make the tie between an active storm season and the hot weather. Some aren't buying it. Just yesterday AW had a football game and I can't remember the last time I felt that hot - it may have also been the fact that almost our entire team was playing both offense and defense, but I digress. Is it global warming? El Niño (which is spanish for 'the niño')? Or something more sinister?

update: Storm names still left on the list: Stan, Tammy, Vince, & Wilma.

This afternoon I updated the version of Xbox Media Center that was installed on my hacked Xbox. If you recall, I installed most everything using Slayer's AutoInstaller, which works great for getting you up and going quickly.
Xbox Media Center allows you to access all of your MP3 and WMA files on your Xbox HD as well as your Windows Network. You can also play music from iTunes and Shoutcast servers. Not only music is available on XBMC, you can also use it for slideshows (which I've done with our honeymoon pics) and for playing movies (DVDs and video files like .mpg, .avi and .wmv). The older version had all of these features, but one of the new features is the ability to change RSS feeds to receive the latest news headlines. Slashdot and Yahoo news headlines can be accessed like this.

The kicker for me was the ability to have Milkdrop for visualizations for the music. The default visualizations for MP3s and the like was your average run-of-the-mill blurred oscilliscopes and spectrum analyzers. Milkdrop adds a virtually limitless array of plugins to allow for any mix of visualization plugins. The new version also features an improved web-interface to control music/video playback on the Xbox. Couple all these new features with the Xbox remote control and the enhanced audio adapter to allow for Dolby/DTS output and you've got a setup that rivals most any homebrew home theater PC setup.

update: After installing XBMC I found a few additional scripts that are very handy. My favorites that I have installed are XMovieGuide, which shows movie times at area theaters; XRadar, shows local area weather radar; and the 'PBS Frontline script', to view the streaming video archives of the television show "Frontline" on the Xbox.

Jennifer and I returned home from our honeymoon last week, we have most our stuff here under our own roof, but quite a bit is still boxed up - though we're making headway. School starts up for her very soon, and I still have about 3 weeks until the fall semester begins here at LeTourneau University.

You may have noticed there hasn't been much activity on the main page here, well, that's because all the cool kids are out back in the forums. If you haven't checked them out, you can click on them here, or at the top of the page. I posted some pics from the honeymoon (we went to Niagara Falls) in the forums. There are also pictures from the wedding that Valt took.

Most recently, Jennifer and I acquired a fish tank that we saw advertised for a good price in the local paper classifieds. I cleaned it yesterday and the day before and set it up last night. Right now I just have it circulating the water and we'll probably populate it with a few guppies and some cleaning fish. Hopefully the guppy population will boom and the tank will be teeming with life within the next few months.

update: Just added a female guppy and 3 ghost shrimp to the tank, just to kick things off. (Cost: $1)

Many a moment have been spent by various contributors of this website, namely the great Grendel himself, in fixing errors committed by those who are entirely too silly to learn basic markup tags for links.

The scary thing is that most of you gallant offenders try to compensate for this lack of not being dumb by instituting some veiled attempt at forum delimiting code. No more, says I! Herein will you find the key to all that you desire, or at least something that makes us smack our heads in frustration a tad less.

HOW TO CREATE A LINK USING HTML

Item One: The Anchor Tag

The anchor tag is the root basis for creating a link. It says to the browser, "O hay, you remember where I am, being an anchor and all, and you go check out this page that I'm linking." It is because of this that you can click back after clicking a link and the browser knows what page to display.

Item Two: The Hypertext REFerence

The hypertext reference, or href, says to the browser, "Why hello there! This is where we'll be traveling today!" In short, it is the page to which the link points. Combining these two ideas is some markup that looks like the following:

<a href="yourlinkhere.html">

Note: The purpose for the angle brackets, < and >, is to delimit the markup from plain text. They let the browser know what is HTML and what is not. The equal sign and the quotation marks are common ways to identify and specify a variable. In our case, where the link is going.

Item Three: Naming And Closing The Anchor

So, after you've opened the anchor, provided a hypertext reference, and specified where you want the link to go, you need to name the link and close the anchor tag. The link name is what will be displayed by the browser when it reads the link markup. This value is specified between the opening and closing anchor tags. To close the anchor tag, simply issue another anchor tag but with a forward slash in front, like thus:

<a href="yourlinkhere.html">Your Link</a>

More goodies on HTML can be found at HTML Goodies.