Another reason why I haven’t donated blood in awhile…

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/services/newspaper/printedition/sunday/localandstate/orl-maxwell0809feb08,0,6961553.column

When Bob Horner found out that Anne Chinoda, CEO of Florida's Blood Centers, was making $500,000 a year, he got angry.
And when he learned that some of the nonprofit's board members and their companies were involved in millions of dollars of deals with the agency they were supposedly watchdogging, he got angrier still.
Horner, after all, said he was a regular blood donor. And he had no idea his veins were helping pump so much money in so many directions.
So Horner fired off an e-mail to the nonprofit's top employees, saying the big spending made him "think twice about donating my blood."

In response, Blood Centers public-relations manager Larry Ganns responded: "Hardly anyone will pick up this story and run with it because the Sentinel is largely irrelevant. It's not like Anne took stimulus money and purchased a G5. Wake me up when you have news."
Not exactly the response Horner expected.

I became disillusioned about blood centers when I found out how much they charge research hospitals centers to have access to such blood. I give it for free, and they turn around and make a huge profit. Lame.

Behind the scenes of a football game broadcast

I found this really awesome newspaper article about what goes on in the trailer behind the scenes of an NFL football game. It is a really good read.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200901/football-television

Philips 21:9 aspect TV

Have you ever noticed that when you are watching a movie, even if you have a widescreen TV (16:9 or 16:10 aspect), there are still sometimes black bars on the top and bottom. Obviously, I prefer the bars to stretched images (don’t get me started about those).

There is a new product coming to the market that could help alot with said movie viewing. It is the Philips 21:9 56” TV.

The downside is that is appears to only be available in Europe.

From a technical perspective, having a 21:9 aspect TV is nice. You’ll often notice on the back of a DVD box a mention that the film is presented in a 2.35 aspect ratio. 21:9 works out to 2.33, which is pretty darn close. HDTV is a 16:9 aspect ratio, or around 1.78, whereas standard definition (NTSC at least) is 4:3, or 1.33. (note, not all movies are 2.35, but quite a few are)

So yeah. Lets hope this pick up enough interest that Philips will bring them over to the states. Oh, and another use would be for co-op gaming, you could have 2 players using side-by-side and still have a decent amount of screen space to use.

http://www.cinematicviewingexperience.com/

So I decided to do a little bit more of programming.

Molly started Weight Watchers again today. I got out her Ti-83+ calculator and wrote a quick program to calculate the points values of stuff.

The code is:

ClrHome
Disp “WELCOME TO MOLLY”
Disp “S WEIGHT WATCHER”
Disp “CALCULATOR”
Disp “”
Disp “PLEASE ENTER:”
Disp “THE FIBER”
Input A
ClrHome
Disp “THE CALORIES”
Input B
ClrHome
Disp “THE FAT”
Input C
ClrHome
Disp “THE POINTS ARE:”
round(B/50+C/12-min(A,4)/5,0)>X
Disp X

It works exactly as desired, and I’m quite happy with it

nVidia’s Ion

So nVidia released their Ion platform today (review can be found here: http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/16340). It looks good, for a niche. I don’t see it working as well in the netbook market, but for HTPC’s or business computing, I think that it would work great. It’s got more utility than the Intel platform, and not much more power usage. Heck, you could replace even a low-end Dell Optiplex with one of those, and have more than enough for a 22” monitor, and maybe a 24” with the $$-savings.

So I’m going to try to start writing again. We’ll see how this goes.