Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Thank You
Right now I'm trying to concentrate on school. Its proving more difficult than I imagined, but would be impossible without you guys. I'm going to finish this semester as strongly as I can (thank you too, Mr. Vargas) and worry about the rest of my situation afterward. What happens then I don't know; I can't look that far ahead yet. Wish me luck, and thank you again for everything you've done for me.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Bill Mahood Loses Big Time
From MMA Junkie:
The California State Athletic Commission has issued Bill Mahood a one-year suspension and $2,500 fine due to a failed drug test. Mahood suffered a first-round submission loss (due to a rib injury) to Bobby Southworth during a Sept. 29 Strikeforce show at the Playboy Mansion. Bill Douglas of the CSAC today stated Mahood tested positive for Drostanolone, an anabolic steroid. Mahood, a one-time UFC fighter, earned just $1,000 for the fight, according to paperwork filed with the CSAC.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Hitachi: Hard Drives Are Getting Better
In all fairness, the hard drive was replaced for free. I just found the timing of the article kinda funny. Find the original article here.
Hitachi: Hard Drives Are Getting Better
Oct 15, 7:48 AM (ET)By MAY WONG
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Multimedia stockpilers need not worry about laptops, digital video recorders or portable music players hitting a storage capacity ceiling any time soon.
Hitachi Ltd. (HIT) (HIT) says its researchers have successfully shrunken a key component in hard drives to a nanoscale that will pave the way for quadrupling today's storage limits to 4 terabytes for desktop computers and 1 terabyte on laptops in 2011.
A terabyte can hold the text of roughly 1 million books, 250 hours of high-definition video, or a quarter million songs.
"It means the industry is making good progress to advance the capacity of disk drives and move to smaller form factors," said John Rydning, an analyst at market research firm IDC.
The feat, which Hitachi plans to present Monday at the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference in Tokyo, revisits a technology known as giant magnetoresistance, or GMR, that was the basis of the work of two European scientists who won the Nobel Prize in physics last week.
A hard drive has a metal disk inside that spins as an arm with an electromagnetic head at its tip hovers over it. The head reads bits of data by registering the magnetic bearing of the particles on the disk.
Capacities of hard drives have grown as researchers have crammed more bits of data closer together while also making the heads sensitive enough to read the data. The industry looks to new technologies every time physical limitations kick in, and GMR - which allows for extremely thin layers of alternating metals to detect weak changes in magnetism - was one of the breakthroughs that led to the fastest growth rate in the early 2000s, allowing hard drives to double in capacity every year.
But GMR-based heads maxed out, and the industry replaced the technology in recent years with an entirely different kind of head. Yet researchers are predicting that technology will soon run into capacity problems, and now GMR is making a comeback as the next-generation successor.
"We changed the direction of the current and adjusted the materials to get good properties," said John Best, chief technologist for Hitachi's data-storage unit.
By doing so, Hitachi said it has created the world's smallest disk drive heads in the 30-nanometer to 50-nanometer range, or about 2,000 times smaller than the width of an average human hair.
Other hard drive companies are working on similar technology as well, Rydning said. He predicted the entire disk drive industry will begin migrating to this new type of GMR-based technology in 2009.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Ring of Combat: Opponent for Brian McLaughlin?
Janicik Industries will keep you informed as to what's going on, as soon as we hear about it. Again, as of right now, Brian is fully anticipating a fight a week from Friday. See you all there!
Friday, October 12, 2007
Randy Leaves the UFC
The reason that seems more understandable to me for Randy having left is the fact that he won't likely be fighting Fedor. Randy wants to fight Fedor, fine. Fedor signs with M1, and now they can't fight. I can understand a fight with Fedor being one of the biggest reasons that Randy is still competing as a professional athlete at 44 years old. If that is what was driving me, I'd probably retire too.
Randy, please get off of the money and respect issues. You signed your contract, you agreed to the money. If a lack of respect is what you're calling Zuffa's lack of desire to pay you more than you agreed to, just stop it. Don't let your career end with an image like this. I hope we haven't heard the last of this issue.
For source links, see the sports column at the Janicik Report.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
NAGA: NAGC 2007
I will be competing in this tournament as a featherweight. Here's the flyer, and here's the official site.
This is sweet on many levels, one of the biggest ones is the fact that we can weigh in the day before. It would be even nicer if the featherweight division topped out at 145, but I'll take 149.9. Time for me to start running and starving...
Boy, 6, Tries to Drive to Applebee's
MSNBC.com |
Boy, 6, tries to drive to Applebees
BROOMFIELD, Colo. - A 6-year-old boy was hungry and decided he'd go to Applebees. So he grabbed the car keys, took his booster seat from the back seat of his grandmother's car and placed it in the driver's seat, then made a go of driving himself to the restaurant Tuesday.
He made it about 75 feet. Unable to take the car out of reverse, he crossed the street and ran into a transformer and communication box, knocking out electricity and phone service to dozens of townhomes.
Nobody was injured and the boy, whose name was not released, got out of his car and told his grandmother what happened.
"He proceeded to start the car and started backing up," said Sgt. Colleen O'Connell of the Broomfield Police Department. "He went backward about 47 feet, hit the curb, then went backward another 29 feet."
Investigators couldn't figure out how the boy reached the accelerator.
No charges will be filed.
"I have five children of my own, so I know you cannot watch them every minute they're awake," said nearby resident Nancy Hollis, whose power was knocked out by the accident.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21216913/
Status of The Janicik Report, The Janicik Blog, and Me
Back in June, I got hit with the Vundo virus on my computer. It made my processor run ape shit, and burned out all the sectors of my hard drive. I had to replace the hard drive, which I did. Since then, everything had been going fine until a few weeks ago. Although I don't think that I have another virus, my computer has been running exponentially slower, and now its at the point that it simply doesn't work. I had the guys at the Student Help Desk here at New Paltz do a "fitness test" (something that I had never heard of with relationship to a computer's hard drive) and the results showed that there were many bad sectors on my 3 month old hard drive. WTF, right?
I brought my computer back to the guys who fixed it the first time, and everyone agrees that it is likely a defective hard drive that is the culprit. Chances are I'll have to go through the same stuff that I went through last time (reinstalling, etc.), but it will be free. It will also be easier this time around since I bought a 500 gig external hard drive to hold all of my files (music, videos, docs, etc.).
Other things that have been assailing me...nothing really all that serious, except that I can't seem to get a handle on my sleep patterns. Fortunately, I'm at my prime of day when it comes time to train, but I can't seem to get to sleep at reasonable hours. This is fine when I don't have classes, but when I do I'm dead for the entire day. This has been going on since I left UPS. Although it might make some sense that the whacked out sleep schedule I was on while at UPS would have a lasting negative impact on me, but I didn't think 4 months...anyway, I've got a banged up ankle and elbow from training and that's about it. Between that and the massive increase in fiber I've been taking to get ready to make weight at NAGA...well, at least I still know the difference between that issue and my elbow.
Anyway, that's whats going on with me right now for all those who keep up to date with my online stuff. Hopefully I'll have my computer back soon, and this sleep thing will go away sooner than later. Be safe out there...
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Promotion
Anyway, the important point in this post is to announce that I got a promotion. I was awarded two stripes, bringing me up to three. I am now a three stripe white belt, and damn proud of it. So feel free to do the comment thing with your congratulations! HA! Anyway, that's that, go me.