NASA Ames Research Center

Today I chaperoned a school field trip to NASA Ames Research Center here in Silicon Valley. The educational program focused on wind tunnels and some aspects of creating vehicles for space travel. Overall it was interesting and seemed to hold the kids’ interest pretty well. Of course I volunteered because I’m interested in this great facility right here in our backyard. Anyone commuting near highways 85, 101, or 237 in Mountain View has seen this facility’s impressive buildings. Tonight I did a little digging to see what kind of online information I could find. The official Ames Research Center site…

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San Jose Sharks Close Discussion Board

It looks like the San Jose Sharks had enough of the problems with trying to keep a clean community discussion board and finally shut theirs down: The Sharks Chatroom has been shutdown indefinitely due to repeated inappropriate abuse of the system. This decision is in response to the high volume of postings containing sexually explicit language, cyber sex links, junk mail, unacceptable or inflammatory language and more. We do not wish to have the Sharks organization, our fans, or our sponsors associated in any manner with this material and, considering the many youth who regularly visit sjsharks.com, wish to avoid…

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Adtunes.com

A few recent searches for songs used in TV commercials has led me to Adtunes.com which is all about “…music used in television commercials, film trailers, movie soundtracks, tv shows, video games and more.” The site is basically built around a forum, a weblog up front (albeit updated only monthly) and a generous supply of advertising. The forum is where the action is — for everyone looking for the music behind a certain commercial, there seems to be several who have the answer. Tonight I was searching for the new Cadillac commercial and found it was “Punk Rocker from the…

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Posted in: Web

Yahoo! Messenger for Windows Vista

In conjunction with CES this week, we are showing a preview of a new Windows Vista version of Yahoo! Messenger. This client was created from scratch to take advantage of Vista technologies, particularly the user interface and display. Because they started fresh, the team was not hindered by the existing design and was able to test some new concepts for personal interactions. Check out the site to see some screenshots and to watch a screencast given by Josh our product manager. I’m sure the difficult part will come soon as the team decides how much of today’s Messenger client needs…

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