I was literally down to hours before the Beta copy of Win7 that I’ve been running on my primary home machine was about to expire – I did my backup and decided to go for it. 

Originally, I was under the impression that I couldn’t make the upgrade without having to re-install everything but after doing a little searching around, found that it is indeed possible – with a little bit of file manipulation – to do the upgrade from Beta to RC – and it’s even (somewhat tangentially) approved by Microsoft. 

SO, Kudos to the Win7 development team – it appears to have worked very well… of course, time will tell.

When RTM comes out, though, I will be doing a clean install then – good excuse to buy a new, bigger, hard drive.

Ok, a couple of days ago, I had something of an epiphany about how I find out about things… I originally heard about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center from a friend via an email – and it took quite a bit of messing about but we at the office were able to watch the broadcast news on my office computer via a remote desktop to the video capture on my computer at home – it wasn’t great viewing – but we were able to see it… fast forward plenty of years and I’m sitting at my computer and checking my Twitter feed and notice in the tag cloud that there is something about a train wreck in DC… In the strangest way, before any of the ‘official news’ outlets are picking it up, I’m hearing about news that is amazingly accurate – if taken in this larger scale, it starts looking a lot like Asimov’s Psychohistory from the Foundation series

One of the guys I work with and I were discussing how this real-time access to the crowd, in this case, via Twitter, is amazing in how it can aggregate together and produce a picture that is remarkably accurate.  Of course, the flip side is – it can be totally inaccurate, too – buyer beware, I guess Harrison Ford is glad they were wrong.

So it was with a slight bit of amazement that I saw floating in the tag cloud: Jackson and Dead.  WTF?!  A couple of clicks later and I’m sitting there just a little bit stunned.

When did the 80’s start dying?  In a matter of days, three icons of my 80’s life have ceased to exist in the mortal plane (Not to mention they are STILL planning on remaking the A-Team – don’t get me started on that). 

It’s just all very unsettling some days…

So I’ve been reading all about the Arduino microcontroller board and what it can do for quite a while -- between Make Magazine, their blog and a few other sites on my daily RSS Feed rotation (Hack-a-Day, Evil Mad Scientist Labs, oomlout, and plenty of others) I have had my appetite whet for getting back into some microcontroller firmware programming again…

After uploading the LED blinking ‘hello world’ app to and then playing with that, then making the LED fade in and out using PWM instead of just blinking, I had to find a project...

I’ve seen his work done a few other times (http://vimeo.com/keithloutit) but this one is really cool and has a story in it.

If you have never seen the tilt-shift photography – this is all real-life scenes, done in stop-motion with a special lens.

Anyways, here it is…

Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.