I think that's a record for the number of acronyms in a post title. Anyway, this presentation is absolutely incredible in its ability to make sense of what they're doing over at CERN with the Large Hadron Collider. Here it is.

The house will be ours this Friday. Going to Home Depot to get the buckets of paint today (and rollers), and this weekend we'll be at the new house cleaning up and rubbing down the walls of dust for painting. Hopefully we'll get a bunch of the painting done too, but there's a lot to get done. We're painting the family room, the living room, the hallways (upstairs and downstairs), and the master bedroom. Colors are a warm red for the living room (the first room you enter from the front door), shale blue for the family room, a light tan or beige for the hallways (staying with a neutral color there), and "sage green" for the master bedroom.

The painting will be about 80% of what we plan to do, the other 20% being new lights for the kitchen and bringing in all the furniture. I'll most likely be going back and forth next week while Nadia is at work so I can get the work done that we need to before we head down to South Hadley! Oh boy I can't wait... sucks that we'll only be staying in Massachusetts for about 4 days (including driving there and back, so only 3 days really), but it'll be time well spent.

Oh, here's some huge news for me but not so much for anyone else really: Star Trek Online is in bigtime development now after being picked up by Cryptic Studios from Perpetual Entertainment. It's release date isn't known, but is estimated it could be as soon as Q4 of 2009... yeah I know that's like a year from now, but whatever... haha. They have a gameplay trailer up too, and it's footage taken directly from the game as they have it right now. No rendered scenes, no scripted playing. Pure demo footage. Gotta love it.

Oh yeah, one more thing. A while ago I posted some information on a collaborative idea called Cquestrate, which was about adding lime to seawater to reduce CO2 emissions in the atmosphere. Well one of the people who works for them actually visited this very website and posted a comment! Check it out here: http://brianirish.com/2008/07/21/cquestrate-an-interesting-environmental-idea/. Totally cool that he took the time to do that, in my opinion. Should be even more of a reason to check out their website! http://www.cquestrate.com/

Okay that's all for me. Cheers.

Holmes on Homes

I never knew HGTV was such a worthwhile channel until I became a homeowner. By far, my favorite show (as Nadia is well aware of) is Holmes on Homes. In the United States, the show is on TLC I believe... Anyway, there are full episodes online from Seasons 5, 6 and 7 if you can't catch any on the television. You can check them out here. Mike Holmes (the host) is invited by families to their houses after contractors have come in and f*cked everything up and left, often causing huge financial problems for the family. Holmes brings in his crew, usually ends up tearing everything apart (this is the most entertaining part, watching his reaction as he uncovers really shoddy construction), and rebuilds everything. His motto "Make It Right" is what he goes by as he delivers the final product, often going above and beyond what the homeowner was expecting.

Anyway, I could go on and on about this show, but you probably have better things to do. Yesterday morning Nadia and I went to brunch at Karen's place with all of the cousins, as it was to serve as a "goodbye" to their house. Her parents have sold it and purchased a new house, so as they are very excited for the new house, they are getting ready to say goodbye to 25 years of memories.

A little bit of website work done today, going to begin working on taking down some shelving in our apartment to get ready for the move. Wow - only 4 more days until we officially own a house. Can you believe it?

I've stumbled upon a website called Cquestrate, which is an "open-source" movement to bring an idea to fruition, thus solving the problem of excessive CO2 emissions in our atmosphere. The idea: Add lime to our sea waters. Adding lime will give the sea water twice the capability of absorbing CO2, and even though the process of extracting the lime via mining creates CO2, the amount it ends up absorbing is double of what is needed to extract it, thus still being a "carbon-negative" process.

They're looking for intelligent people who are experts in related fields (mining, environmental analysis, bulk transport, etc.) to submit their ideas and answers to problems to their website. Even if their method of adding lime to seawater doesn't end up working, their method of finding a solution is very creative and powerful. Utilizing the internet and patent-free ideology, they can freely tap into the enormous brain power of everyone who visits their website.

And speaking of their website, here it is!

Do you think it's a viable method of reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere? Add your thoughts in the comments below.

A well-written and relatively short article on writing with style, by famed author Kurt Vonnegut. He also happens to be my wife's favorite author of all time, so, he's got that going for him.

How to Write With Style

Amazing. With our recent purchase of a Playstation 3, I went out and used a Best Buy gift card (Thanks Mark and Miranda!!) to help purchase Planet Earth in Blu Ray. I dragged my friend Jean with me on our way to karate to buy it, haha.

I'm someone who's easily impressed by nature (watching the lightning from our balcony during thunderstorms is a favorite passtime), and man, it's really something else. I don't know how they were able to capture some of the scenes they have in there, but I highly recommend it to everyone!

Quite a fascinating site: http://globalrichlist.com/

You insert your annual salary, and it tells you what top percentile you're in compared to the rest of the world. I particularly like the text afterwards that states for $2400, you could buy a new HDTV for your living room, or you could provide schooling for entire generation of children in an Angolan village. I'm not certain where they're pulling their numbers from, but it's interesting if it's even remotely true!