First, to celebrate my son’s birthday (see previous post)
an article that he would appreciate. During his high-school years, Mike worked at a computer gaming parlor, but one that had a side business of reading old tapes for oil companies. It seems that the oil companies would store their geologic data on archival tape. Most of it was seismic lines. The tapes survived the test of time for the most part, but the machines that put the data on the tape? Not so much. Mike’s company had those tape players and Mike knows how to get the data off of the tapes and into a usable format.

Well, it turns out that NASA is on the lookout for a working tape player as well. It seems that some of the data beamed back from the Apollo missions was recorded on special tape players and then the tape…

was lost. Well, not lost actually. It was misplaced before it was archived. Thrown in a dumpster perhaps? Nope. Just hidden under the floorboards of a theater.

The tape player needed to play the tapes back is about the size of a refrigerator, and there happens to be one in the Computer Museum in Australia, where the tapes were originally made

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/10/2415393.htm

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When ya gotta go, there’s a place out back

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Sometimes you feel like a nut
Sometimes you don’t

I had January 7th in the pool of “When does Lindsey Lohan decide she wants a penis again?” and I was so wrong. It was November 16th.

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Republican ghost writers must be chomping at the bit to write Sarah Palin’s memoirs after reports started filtering in of the estimated 7 Million Dollars advance on the manuscript. I use the word estimates, because there’s no official word, and this is just reading the entrails from the publishers and booksellers I slice open every other week…

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Graphic novels don’t make the New York Times Bestseller lists, much to the chagrin of comic book publishers and cool paranormal mystery writers.

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Where staying AWAY from the Dr. made this woman lighter.

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Folks around the Houston area simply didn’t get their electric meter read during the time when the hurricane came through and the company was working on getting power restored. Last month’s bills were a generous estimate, but now the meters are read, there’s a huge sticker shock. [Chron.com]

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Am I the only person in America that enjoys watching the American version of LIFE ON MARS more than the original English version?

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Update on Blogging RanchoCali — The well spud date got pushed back by ten days or so because of insurance issues. I hope to have an additional update later in the week.

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Finally, all those comic book based movies. Here’s a list of 75 comic book based movies coming to a theater near you.

You’ll note that T.H.U.N.D.E.R. AGENTS is not one of them. There’s a reason for that. And I won’t tell the tale. yet.