Friday, June 27, 2003

Nature can be fascinating from the exquisite flowers and undersea lie, to the tender relationships between animals.... it can also be startling and awe inspiring stars and galaxies, powerful earthquakes and tidal-waves - far beyond mans control. They've just discovered an entirely unknown form of lightning :

Scientists have discovered a startling secret in the sky: gigantic jets of lightning that shoot upward from cloud tops to nearly 60 miles into the upper atmosphere.

Unlike the familiar lightning bolts, these brilliant jets spread out in extremely thin air to form shapes resembling giant trees or carrots some 50 miles tall, according to a study by researchers in Taiwan.

Wired Lightning Article
Cool.....
posted by Mike Foord on Friday, June 27, 2003



Recent website changes :

Not much - you can see the changes to the blog, I've now got my personal diary and this techie one.... also the archives below are done by the month rather than the week. That means in a year there will only be twelve new lines added to this page instead of 52 !!

As I've added a few pages recently I've rebuilt the search index - so any searches you do will now include all the recent pages in the results. I think thats actually it ! Oh - no, I rebuilt the 'big bookmarks' page in the coollinkls section... removing a lot of dead links and adding a stack more. The links pages are surprisingly popular ! That whole section is due for a rebuild soon... I've got lots more links to ad and a few tweaks to make..............

I'm still getting about 200 visitors a day, which is great - three months ago I was getting 20 visitors a day. Google went weird and only indexed a few of my pages - which didn't help... its now indexing the whole site and I'm getting a lot more visitors - it was mainly making posts to USENET groups that increased my traffic though.............
posted by Mike Foord on Friday, June 27, 2003



Speaking to a few of my readers *cough* (well friends anyway) and they say they've given up on my blogs because of all the techie stuff I include. I figure the converse (good word huh !) might also be true - that folk who are interested in the techie stuff might not give a damn about the minutiae (how do you spell that one ?) of my love life.... (I'm getting married soon... nah nah ne nah nah... :-).

Sooooooooo.... I'm doing a personal blog and a techie blog on this page............ wee ha... (I don't know which one to put website updates on though.... if I add a new article it feels kinda personal man.... *sigh*)

Anyway - enough of my yada yada -
Here's an interesting Wired article. Apparently the new airport scanners solve the problem of traditional x-rays not being able to see plastic explosives.... by revealing everything under your clothing.... yup - including the stretch marks........
posted by Mike Foord on Friday, June 27, 2003