Jello Llama
"Come live with me in Hampsteadshireton!"
quinta-feira, abril 22, 2004
The Simple Living Network
The Web Of Simplicity
Just starting to simplify your life? We suggest you begin with this step-by-step guide to resources and tools
domingo, abril 18, 2004
Weird Animal of the Day
Weird Animal of the Day
The Pipa Pipa Frog!
* These amphibians are shaped like squarish pancakes with the head flat on top. The nose is pointed with small black lidless eyes that look like tiny beads.
Diet
* Wild: any small aquatic animal, dead or alive
Behavior
* Highly aquatic, adults rarely venture onto land
* Obtain food by sweeping through mud with star-shaped fingertips;
must sweep food into the mouth with feet because they have
no tongue or teeth
segunda-feira, abril 12, 2004
The Joy of Concrete
Concrete casts new light in dull rooms
11 March 2004
Light transmitting concrete is set to go on sale later this year.
The days of dull, grey concrete could be about to end. A Hungarian architect has combined the world’s most popular building material with optical fiber from Schott to create a new type of concrete that transmits light.
 Letting the light in |
A wall made of “LitraCon” allegedly has the strength of traditional concrete but thanks to an embedded array of glass fibers can display a view of the outside world, such as the silhouette of a tree, for example.
“Thousands of optical glass fibers form a matrix and run parallel to each other between the two main surfaces of every block,” explained its inventor Áron Losonczi. “Shadows on the lighter side will appear with sharp outlines on the darker one. Even the colours remain the same. This special effect creates the general impression that the thickness and weight of a concrete wall will disappear.”
 Light-transmitting concrete |
The hope is that the new material will transform the interior appearance of concrete buildings by making them feel light and airy rather than dark and heavy.
Losonczi, a 27 year old architect from Csongrád recently came up with the idea while he was studying at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm, Sweden. After demonstrating the material at design exhibitions all over Europe he has now formed a company to commercialize the concept.
His new company, also called LitraCon, is now optimizing its manufacturing methods and hopes to start selling prefabricated blocks of the material later this year.
 Commerical possibilities |
“In theory, a wall structure built out of the light-transmitting concrete can be a couple of meters thick as the fibers work without any loss in light up to 20 m,” explained Losonczi. “Load-bearing structures can also be built from the blocks as glass fibers do not have a negative effect on the well-known high compressive strength of concrete. The blocks can be produced in various sizes with embedded heat isolation too.”
Author
Oliver Graydon is editor of Optics.org and Opto & Laser Europe magazine.
domingo, abril 11, 2004
Andromeda Streaming Jukebox: MP3 server for PHP & ASP -- via Blogcritics
drag . . drop . . stream
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quarta-feira, abril 07, 2004
Bicycle Riding on Square Wheels
Before starting our long working week, let's relax with this story of a bicycle with square wheels. No, it's not a joke. And it even rides smoothly. But there is a trick: the road must have a specific shape. The Math Trek section of Science News Online tells us more about this strange bicycle -- actually a tricycle with one front wheel and two back wheels.
Stan Wagon, a mathematician at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., has a bicycle with square wheels. It's a weird contraption, but he can ride it perfectly smoothly. His secret is the shape of the road over which the wheels roll.
Here is Stan Wagon riding his tricycle (Credit: Stan Wagon).
A square wheel can roll smoothly, keeping the axle moving in a straight line and at a constant velocity, if it travels over evenly spaced bumps of just the right shape. This special shape is called an inverted catenary.
A catenary is the curve describing a rope or chain hanging loosely between two supports. At first glance, it looks like a parabola. In fact, it corresponds to the graph of a function called the hyperbolic cosine. Turning the curve upside down gives you an inverted catenary -- just like each bump of Wagon's road.
In fact, the idea is not new, and Wagon picked it after seeing an exhibit about square wheels at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. But Wagon went further by exploring the relationship between all kinds of wheels and road shapes.
Just as a square rides smoothly across a roadbed of linked inverted catenaries, other regular polygons, including pentagons and hexagons, also ride smoothly over curves made up of appropriately selected pieces of inverted catenaries. As the number of a polygon's sides increases, these catenary segments get shorter and flatter. Ultimately, for an infinite number of sides (in effect, a circle), the curve becomes a straight, horizontal line.
Here is the conclusion of the article.
So far, no one has found a road-and wheel combination in which the road has the same shape as the wheel. That's an intriguing challenge for mathematicians.
So why don't you try to solve this math puzzle?
domingo, abril 04, 2004
sábado, abril 03, 2004
sexta-feira, abril 02, 2004
quinta-feira, abril 01, 2004
Webjay - "more work music" by jim
more work music
music for managing unix services by jim
| ghost tells personal story | Copy |
| evergreen_plastic_bag.mp3 | Copy |
| grottmusic |
Welcome to Gmail
A Google approach to email
Gmail is an experiment in a new kind of webmail, built on the idea that you should never have to delete mail and you should always be able to find the message you want. The key features are:
Search, don't sort.
Use Google search to find the exact message you want, no matter when it was sent or received.
Don't throw anything away.
1000 megabytes of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message.
Keep it all in context.
Each message is grouped with all its replies and displayed as a conversation.
No pop-up ads. No banners.
You see only relevant text ads and links to related web pages of interest.
terça-feira, março 30, 2004
segunda-feira, março 29, 2004
quinta-feira, março 25, 2004
quarta-feira, março 24, 2004
DO YOU HAVE PARASITES?
DO YOU HAVE PARASITES?
Screen for Adware, Spyware, Scumware, Diallers, ?Jackers
and other unsolicited commercial software
This page allows you to check your computer for a hundred different parasites!
sábado, março 20, 2004
i used to believe
i used to believe
is a collection of ideas that adults
thought were true when
they were children
domingo, março 14, 2004
legal!!
Congratulations, Mario!
Your IQ score is 126
This number is the result of a formula based on how many questions you answered correctly on Tickle's Classic IQ test. Your IQ score is scientifically accurate; to read more about the science behind our IQ test, click here.
During the test, you answered four different types of questions — mathematical, visual-spatial, linguistic and logical. We analyzed how you did on each set of those questions, which reveals the way your brain processes information.
We also compared your answers with others who have taken the test. According to the sorts of questions you got correct, we can tell your Intellectual Type is a Word Warrior.
This means you have exceptional verbal skills. You can easily make sense of complex issues and take an unusually creative approach to solving problems. Your strengths also make you a visionary. Even without trying you're able to come up with lots of new and creative ideas. And that's just a small part of what we know about you from your test results.
Find out more about your unique intellectual strengths in your personalized 15-page IQ report. It's ready right now!
Your IQ score is 126
This number is the result of a formula based on how many questions you answered correctly on Tickle's Classic IQ test. Your IQ score is scientifically accurate; to read more about the science behind our IQ test, click here.
During the test, you answered four different types of questions — mathematical, visual-spatial, linguistic and logical. We analyzed how you did on each set of those questions, which reveals the way your brain processes information.
We also compared your answers with others who have taken the test. According to the sorts of questions you got correct, we can tell your Intellectual Type is a Word Warrior.
This means you have exceptional verbal skills. You can easily make sense of complex issues and take an unusually creative approach to solving problems. Your strengths also make you a visionary. Even without trying you're able to come up with lots of new and creative ideas. And that's just a small part of what we know about you from your test results.
Find out more about your unique intellectual strengths in your personalized 15-page IQ report. It's ready right now!
sábado, março 13, 2004
quinta-feira, março 11, 2004
Serigraphy, Celebrities, and Joe Petro III
Lizard Lounge
terça-feira, março 09, 2004
Robotic Blogs
Radio Vox Populi takes recently updated blogs, runs them through a text-to-speech synthetiser, and broadcasts the result over the Internet
Comic Art Collective
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Calculating a consulting rate
 | Chris Hanson (![[info]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_s0L0ERf5M2e1SclzZHed5scUTnONV0GJPnL7r1E3--WB8-apPmdvaJ38_N-7I_Lcz6aq8V-R6_a1cOKh85xZvMyA6fvb5s_skfubSo9JKk=s0-d){kind=small} chanson) escreveu,@ 2004-01-12 21:08:00 |
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Calculating a consulting rate
There are a lot of people who think service pricing is essentially made up from whole cloth, or that it's easily convertible to the salary of the person who's performing the service. Neither of these are true.
For example, $40/hour sounds "high," right? After all, for a 2000 hour year that's $80,000 — a very respectable annual salary. But it's actually quite a low rate for a highly experienced software developer in the United States.
There's a bit of work in calculating a realistic bill rate for any sort of consulting. Of course you can only charge what the market will bear, and you'll have to take that into account too. But doing some real modeling in a spreadsheet or a program will help you figure out what you need to charge, and where you have room for adjustment.
For a simple example, start with your base salary. Now tack on 25% as payroll overhead to cover all of the various payroll taxes you'll have to pay. This may be a little high, but it's good to create conservative models. It leaves some room to give, and it also makes it less likely you'll run into unpleasant surprises. (Like, say, losing money even though you're currently billing.)
Now add the rest your expenses. For example, your software and hardware budget for the year. Your general and professional liability insurance. Your benefits. Travel expenses for conferences. Office rent. Phone and utilities. Training classes.
Then calculate a realistic number for your potential billable hours in a year. I've come up with 47 weeks a year with 35 billable hours a week, or 1645 hours. After all, you need some vacation, some sick and personal days, and you can't bill conference attendance or training either. Again, this is a conservative estimate; while you may plan to work 40 hours a week for your clients, you shouldn't make financial plans based on this number.
Finally, figure out your likely utilization. Many consultants estimate 50%; that is, they don't expect to work more than half time, so they need to bill a high enough rate to cover the rest of the year with that. Life will be great if you can get close to 100% utilization, but unless you have a very full sales pipeline or some guaranteed long-term projects, you're living dangerously if you do any financial planning on that basis.
Once you've done all that take your expenses and divide by your potential billable hours multiplied by your utilization. That's your break-even hourly rate, the rate your company can bill without losing money. If your company wants to make a profit, you need to bill something higher than this or get higher utilization (or both).
Note: This is a corrected version of the original post. Thanks to an anonymous poster (see comments) for pointing out my miswording.
There are a lot of people who think service pricing is essentially made up from whole cloth, or that it's easily convertible to the salary of the person who's performing the service. Neither of these are true.
For example, $40/hour sounds "high," right? After all, for a 2000 hour year that's $80,000 — a very respectable annual salary. But it's actually quite a low rate for a highly experienced software developer in the United States.
There's a bit of work in calculating a realistic bill rate for any sort of consulting. Of course you can only charge what the market will bear, and you'll have to take that into account too. But doing some real modeling in a spreadsheet or a program will help you figure out what you need to charge, and where you have room for adjustment.
For a simple example, start with your base salary. Now tack on 25% as payroll overhead to cover all of the various payroll taxes you'll have to pay. This may be a little high, but it's good to create conservative models. It leaves some room to give, and it also makes it less likely you'll run into unpleasant surprises. (Like, say, losing money even though you're currently billing.)
Now add the rest your expenses. For example, your software and hardware budget for the year. Your general and professional liability insurance. Your benefits. Travel expenses for conferences. Office rent. Phone and utilities. Training classes.
Then calculate a realistic number for your potential billable hours in a year. I've come up with 47 weeks a year with 35 billable hours a week, or 1645 hours. After all, you need some vacation, some sick and personal days, and you can't bill conference attendance or training either. Again, this is a conservative estimate; while you may plan to work 40 hours a week for your clients, you shouldn't make financial plans based on this number.
Finally, figure out your likely utilization. Many consultants estimate 50%; that is, they don't expect to work more than half time, so they need to bill a high enough rate to cover the rest of the year with that. Life will be great if you can get close to 100% utilization, but unless you have a very full sales pipeline or some guaranteed long-term projects, you're living dangerously if you do any financial planning on that basis.
Once you've done all that take your expenses and divide by your potential billable hours multiplied by your utilization. That's your break-even hourly rate, the rate your company can bill without losing money. If your company wants to make a profit, you need to bill something higher than this or get higher utilization (or both).
Note: This is a corrected version of the original post. Thanks to an anonymous poster (see comments) for pointing out my miswording.
segunda-feira, março 08, 2004
How to make friends by Telephone
How to make friends by Telephone
Use this instructional guide from the 1940's to learn proper etiquette when operating a telephone.
Use this instructional guide from the 1940's to learn proper etiquette when operating a telephone.
achado em contact sheet
domingo, março 07, 2004
Robotic Blogs
Radio Vox Populi takes recently updated blogs, runs them through a text-to-speech synthethiser, and broadcasts the result over the Internet
Font Matcher - by InFeRn0
What is Font Matcher? Haven't you ever get bored browsing your font catalog? Are you searching for a printed font and you have 9000 TTF's on your CD? Font matcher helps you do that in a few minutes. Just get a bitmap of the letter, select your fonts directory and FontMatcher will compare each TTF with the given bitmap, giving you an exact percent of how much each font matches the given bitmap. Font Matcher is completely Freeware.
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