http://www.rocketracingleague.com/

From the mind of the creator of the X-Prize competition that Scaled Composites won a year ago tomorrow with the Space Ship One reaching 354,200 feet above earth, comes the latest rocket-fueled craze… the X-Prize Cup and the Rocket Racing League. Dr. Peter Diamandis (the founder of the X-Prize Foundation) and Granger Whitelaw (two-time winner of the Indianapolis 500) came together to create the fastest race ever conceived.

Imagine NASCAR in the air doing high angle, high performance turns on a 3D track using GPS and heads-up-displays to stay on course. The creators are even saying sponsorship of rockets will work similarly to that of NASCAR; the helmets, pressure suits, and rockets will be covered with sponsor logos.

Though this is an interesting idea, it’s not 100% original (though this is the only REAL life attempt at the idea): the Wipeout line of PlayStation and PC games were some of the first to take racing rockets to the main-stream when the franchise of games started back in ’96.

Regardless of originality, I’m still looking forward to checking out this new type of racing. Since some of the most outspoken people who watch NASCAR are rednecks, takes the term “space cowboy” to a whole new level.

We’ve officially moved into our new apartment!!!

Lauren and I have been quite busy unpacking and getting all of the things done that we need to get done before we leave for Equator.

I’ll post some pictures up when we’ve finished unpacking and the place looks a little better.

Seeing as how Lauren and I are moving to Tucson in about a month, we needed to get moving with finding a place to live when we get there and arranging for our things to be moved. We planned our apartment-finding trip to Tucson around her class schedule, so we left when she was done with classes for the week last Thursday and planned on returning home last Sunday to give her the entire day to study. I had also made arangements to meet with an apartment hunter to help make our trip more productive.

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According to BBC News and CNN News, Rudolph was finally charged and plead guilty for multiple bombings in the late 1990s in Georgia and Alabama. The bombings included the Olympics, a couple of abortion clinics, and a gay bar.

This story hits close to home for me, because, in 1998, I was hiking with Outward Bound in the section of North Carolina where he was reportedly hiding (confirmed now that he’s been caught and tried). When we first arrived to the area, a few hours outside of Ashville, police were conducting man hunts through the woods in an attempt to find him. After spending 16 days in that region, it’s easy to see why they never found him: it’s thickly forested and very easy to hide if you go far enough off of the trails.

The rumor was that Rudolph used the Appalachian Trial to get from Georgia to North Carolina to hide after he carried out each of his attacks. As part of his deal with the authorities, he’s not going to face the death penalty in return for four life sentences and revealing where his stash of explosives was hidden. I, for one, am glad they finally caught him and have tried him for his crimes.

Just in case the news sites clear their caches, Wikipedia has more on the history and current events surrounding Rudolph.

Well, April Fools day just passed a week ago and I thought I’d recap a few more favorable happenings and stories from first of the month. As they do with just about everything that happens in the world, the people who contribute to the Wikipedia created an interesting write up about the day and the pranks pulled.

For starters, I learned that April Fools Day was most likely the backlash from when France decided to move from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar system and a few of the people in France decided to prak other people into thinking it was still New Years (which it was on the previous calendar system). More on that can be found on Snopes.com

One of the more interesting pranks was a rumor that Google was going to take over the Mozilla foundation. MORE INFO HERE. Even though that wouldn’t be too bad considering a few of the main developers for the foundation already work for Google, it would still cause quite a stir in the world of computers.

Another prank pulled was from a software group that I’m quite familiar with. The gallery that I use on this website was developed by a group called tonicmedia and is called Gallery. One of the other leading picture displaying and management packages, Coppermine, posted that the two companies were merging into one larger company just because they felt left out that a bunch of other companies were having all the fun merging. A website was put up to back that prank and help fan the flames (I’m not sure how long it will be up, so HERE is a Google cache of the site).

http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6452_7-5840040-1.html?tag=nl.e404


Those silly cNet hardware reviewers decided to trump up the recent rumors about Apple working with phone companies to create an iTunes enabled cell phone and design one of their own.