Star Trek is finally here!

Isn't this cool?! How long before we can make the hop from one continent to another in the blink of an eye?

ISA | Beaming properties from one atom to another

Wonderware

I went to the ISS Wonderware Technology Update seminar this morning. They presented their new Industrial Application Server technology. I was pretty impressed with the ease of configuring a distributed system and the power of propagating changes from parent object to the children. This functionality has been included to a lesser extent in the new InTouch 9.0 visualization software.

A lazy Saturday

I didn't do much yesterday (but I did wash my car!). First the family went to the Hillsboro Farmer's Market. This is our first trip to a market this year. Last year we had visited the Beaverton Farmer's Market a couple of times. I liked the one in Beaverton better, but maybe the season was not right. We did pick up some nice Italian spicy sausage.

Speaking of spicy. Last year I bought some locally grown Habanero peppers and made a nice hot sauce out of them. This year I'm going to try to grow some from seeds. So I bought a seed variety pack from the Redwood City Seed Company. They should arrive sometime next week so maybe this fall I can make some home-grown hot sauce.

After the market I stopped by the local game store to check up on some friends who were playing a tournament there. As it turned out the tournament was cancelled but they were still there playing some games. They were in the process of setting up
La Strada when I walked in, so I joined them for a quick game.
A good game that I have coming in the second shipment of our June order.

We still had some time left so they taught me Hansa. A nice game, but I still need some more time to figure out the trade routes on the map to make better use of them.

Later that night the family pulled out the old classic Settlers of Catan. This great game doesn't get enough plays, although lately my gaming group is warming up to this one again. The new scenarios in "Das Buch" sure helped.

Audacity

Recently I found a funny PowerPoint presentation in my Inbox and found a way to extract the sound clips from the file. For those interested, you open the presentation (.ppt) file and save it as a webpage. This creates a new directory with all the graphics and sound files.

So I wanted to edit the original sound file to use a clip as my new Windows Startup Sound. A Google search directed me to the NONAGS site which listed Audacity on top. Audacity is a neat little wav-editor that has some really nice features.