During our trip to California last week, we visited the California Science Center to see the Space Shuttle Endeavour. Our goal is to see all of them, and with this latest visit, we’ve only got the Enterprise in New York left to see. However, this does conclude our list of all of the actual shuttles that visited space.
I wanted to share these photos for everyone to enjoy. It’s housed in a temporary location, as they’re building a new space to store it, standing with the fuel tank and boosters attached. That’ll be worth visiting again for sure, but it’ll be a few years before they’re done.
For now, it’s a little cramped in the space, so it’s hard to get as detailed of shots as the Discovery and Atlantis were. However, it’s absolutely worth the visit. The rest of the science center was incredibly cool, so plan ahead to spend at least half a day there. We were pressed for time.
A favorite local bar called Flatiron has some absolutely wild specials daily, which look quite appeasing. But for years, we’ve been joking that they must be using some random food generator to come up with the recipes, because the combinations are things that most sane people wouldn’t consider. Things like this:
Nashville-Hot Blackened Shrimp & Collard Green Alfredo Cavatappi
Which sounds completely random, and might be. Either case, sounds completely delicious. We had been joking for ages though, that someone should create a food generator. Which sent me down a rabbit hole. A friend spent some time creating up a list of ingredients, which I used to generate a word list.
I found some great code for a Adlib generator, which is what was the base of the code I used to create our new toy.
When you goto the page, it pulls from the word list we have created, and combines the 5 ingredients into the creation you see above. While my math isn’t the best, I believe there is about 90,000 potential combinations. So the likelihood of 2 people getting the same creation is pretty low.
The actual code itself is pretty simple – there are 5 variables and it picks a random variable from the list. Each one is named: flavor, protein, dish, served, entree. The example above: General Tso is the flavor, Smoked Turkey is the protein, Quesadilla is the dish, Habanero is the served, and Hummus is the entree.
The page pulls from the javascript and displays the output whenever someone visits the URL or clicks the Refresh button. It’s super simple, and was a fun coding exercise! On top of that, the staff loved it so much that they plan on using some of creations from the page one day.
You can either click here or click the Flatiron image above to visit the page. You definitely need to visit Flatiron in East Atlanta Village and try out some of their specials. The food is amazing and it’s a great atmosphere to throw down some beers.
I found some cool features that Facebook and Twitter both have which is great for indecisive people such as myself. Both social media platforms offer dev tools for flushing their preview cache. Links are at the bottom!
This has been useful for me since I’ve been posting Youtube videos on both lately, and sometimes find that the thumbnail doesn’t quite fit properly.
The way they work is pretty simple – pop in the URL to your video (or website or whatever else) and click a button.
With Facebook, you enter your URL then click on Debug.
On the next screen, click Scrape Again and it will force Facebook to refresh it’s cache. From there, click Edit on your FB post and then pop in the URL again and it should have the updated preview.
Twitter is much of the same process but a little trickier. Start with clicking ‘Preview Card’, which will show you the latest Card preview.
That should be it, but there is an extra step. Likely Twitter.com will still show the old preview. However, if you add something like ?123 at the end of the url (https://www.cyclonesworld.net?123 for example) it will refresh with the latest preview. This doesn’t actually affect the URL you’re sharing and works a treat with Youtube videos.
I wanted to share this since info since I had to dig around to find it. I imagine some other social media platforms offer similar tools, but these are the only two I really use for the moment.
My wife is sick this week and lost her voice. Something I remembered buying awhile back was a cheap megaphone for about $3. It uses C sized batteries which have been sitting in it for years, so naturally they’re dead. On top of that, the batteries cost more than this little cheap megaphone did. Being a genius, I naturally came up with a solution.
AA batteries are the same length and capacity as a C cell battery. Maybe less capacity, but something such as a megaphone, that doesn’t matter a whole lot. If I can make them fit, they will work.
Inserting the batteries on their own didn’t work. They would fall over when trying to close the mouth piece, and even if I did manage to keep a connection, they’d fall out of place as soon as the thing was picked up. The solution was simple: Electrical tape.
Get a rough measurement of the battery, and just wrap that bad boy up in tape. It worked like a champ, and now I can hear my wife again.
Not to be outdone by FedEx, UPS delivered a brand new Dell laptop and did their best to smash it as well. The real issue here is Dell’s packaging is terrible. A $2k laptop being shielded with 1 layer of the cheapest cardboard known to man isn’t a good start. At least they’re quick about sending replacements.
Also, because it looked kind of cool, I took a pic of the busted screen and created a nice wallpaper out of it. Available for download in 1080p.
Recently we were in Cape Canaveral before driving down to the port to hop on the cruise ship Carnival Elation. On my bucket list has been visiting all of the space shuttles across the country. This trip to the Kennedy Space Center was my first time, and seeing the Atlantis checked off shuttle #2 from my list. Though technically with them having pieces of Columbia and Challenger on display, I have seen 4 at this point. Which leaves me with Endeavor and Enterprise.
Snapped a few shots of Atlantis that I wanted to share, and felt that KSC did a really good job of displaying the space bird. With it set up the way it is, you can actually get closer to it than you can Discovery at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
FedEx delivered us a new laptop to the office that had clearly had someone jump up and down on the package before arrival! After being delayed several times, having a $1700 laptop show up in this condition is quite frustrating. The service and support from FedEx over the past few years has gone downhill quite a bit.
In Iceland, we had to try out Fermented Shark. This was on our last night in Iceland, staying in Reykjavik. The place we were at was called Cafe Loki, which was the first place we stopped for food when we arrived. So it was a good send off for an excellent trip.
