What The Future Holds

I’ve been more than a little slack the past few months in updating Survival Machine.  But the impending new year brings with it the potential for resolutions, and I expect to make plenty of those.  In the short term, I need to upgrade WordPress to 2.7.  I also need to finish the lecture series I’ve been listening to, Biology and Human Behavior: The Neurological Origins of Individuality, 2nd Edition by Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky.  It’s a great refresher course considering all the neurobio knowledge I once gained and haven’t needed to exercise since.  I expect to have both of those done by the time New Years’ Day rolls around, and I expect to hit the ground running in 2009.

Meanwhile, I’ll share something with you that I expect you’ll enjoy.  Nearly a year ago, when Suvival Machine was all fresh and new, I linked to Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog and his entry about the Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2007.  Bad Astronomy has since moved to the Discover Magazine blogs site, and true to form, Phil has done it again.  Here you are: The Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2008.  Enjoy.

My favorite of the top ten for 2008, spiral galaxy NGC 7331:

Words From The Ether

I finally gave in to the temptation and jailbraked (or pwned, if you prefer) my iPhone a couple days ago. It was so worth it. Foremost among the plethora of new features my phone now has are the ability to record video and the ability to sync its calendar with my Google Apps (gmail) calendar. These things were major shortcomings of the iPhone, and now they’re all better! (No thanks to Apple). I can also now send and receive multimedia SMS messages such as picture mail. I highly reccommend QuickPwn (I will update with a link soon) for Jailbreaking your iPhone; it was a clear, uncomplicated process that took less than 30 minutes start to finish.

I’m actually writing this entry in WordPress on the iPhone (not an app that requires jailbreaking). So, I don’t feel like typing much more at the moment. I’ll probably post screenshots of my phone once I get it tricked out just the way I like. In the meantime, here’s a self-portrait I took with a app called Snapture (jailbreak required) that packs a lot more features than Apple’s bare-bones built-in camera.