Everyday Experiments

Eyja-what? Eyjafjallajokull is a volcano in Iceland that has been recently making waves - not with its hard-to-pronounce name, mind you - but with its recent eruption that spewed enough ash to paralyze much of northern Europe's airspace. An earlier eruption on March 20 was just a minor belch - a fissure vent, to be exact - but it was enough to shut down runways in the country and cost Swiss pilot Riccardo Mortara a few hours' delay in his fastest round-the-world flight record (he still won the record, by the way).

The latest eruption, occurring on April 14, caused floods from melting glaciers that required the evacuation of some 800 residents. Moreover, it spewed volcanic ash at a height of up to 11 km above the Earth's surface that  spread to most of northern Europe, grounding flights for several days. Here's an image showing the extent of ash cloud cover from Eyjafjallajokull's April 14 eruption - see how it was able to cover the UK, which was more than 1,000 km away.

Just made  my very first seafood paella a few hours back... and I managed to make it all from scratch!



I made this for a dear friend's glad-you're-well-from-influenza lunch. I was visiting and she had a whole lot of seafood stocked up in her fridge so I offered to make her seafood paella. I just made this on the fly, based on what I remembered my mom used to do when she makes the dish. Now I'm not really proud of my [selective] memory, but I think I managed to do justice to the meal.

Have you ever wondered what great contribution you can make to further advance the understanding of human sociology?

Well, fret no more. The US Library of Congress has announced that it will keep an archive of all tweets made on the microblogging service Twitter since March 2006. Yep, that means all the tweets you've sent out - from the most mundane "I'm having enchiladas for lunch" to the most profound "just discovered Angelina Jolie's face is really asymmetrical" will be immortalized in the august archives of the largest library in the world. The LOC made this announcement in its very own Twitter and Facebook pages before the official press release was circulated to the world. A very fitting, a courant approach for a library that has been around since the 1800s.

Response will be most likely ambiguous from the over 75 million Twitter users worldwide. Tweet preservationists might rejoice, but everyday users guilty of sending out the craziest, most drunken, incriminating tweets can only collectively cringe with dread. Before you despair, here's a comforting thought - the LOC has promised it will only highlight the historically and culturally important tweets, like President Obama's "This is history" message. The rest will just go into the LOC's 167-terabyte online archive for the perusal of sociologists, researchers, and the occasional tweet voyeur.

...But if you'd care to read, I'm in the process of linking this blog to MyLot.

After days of figuring out how to create post summaries in Blogger, trying out a few unsuccessful html tweaks here and there, and even being lured into downloading a suspicious widget that asks for blog account details, I finally got the "Read More" link that I've always wanted. And apparently, it's as simple as clicking a humble little button.

Have you ever tried cooking tomato dishes where you end up with the tomatoes tasting more like mush than pizzaz?

Just in... another exploit vulnerability has been discovered in Firefox browsers, allowing the remote execution of arbitrary code (read: MALWARE). Everyone who uses version 3.6 or 3.6.2 of Mozilla Firefox should update their browsers asap. You can download an updated version of Firefox for free here. For more technical details about the latest release and the security bug discovered in Firefox 3.6.x, read the Mozilla tech notes here.

Have you logged on to your Gmail account lately? I was just about to log in to a Gmail account I use for my home-bound hobbies when I was stopped dead in my tracks. The Gmail login page looked as if it was written in txt language! wch mns tht th txt lkd lkd ths: