Today's photo is from a big antique store in Virginia (I think, or maybe Georgia...).  This is the middle part of a big picture frame with a bunch of wine corks glued onto the panel.  It looked pretty neat, as you can see, so I snapped a few pictures of it.

So there has been a lot of stuff going on in the world of technology the past week or two.  Here are some of the more interesting things.

Ken Gypen, author of several Linux-related articles on bit-tech, posted a new article about how to build your own router.  It is very interesting and can be useful if you have tons of unused computers around, like I do.  Be sure to check out Ken's other articles (build your own server and Linux has game), if you haven't already.

AMD released their new generation of video cards, the Radeon HD 4000 series.  TechReport has some thorough articles on the 4850 and 4870.  This new series seems like it might break NVIDIA's hold on the GPU market, and so far it has definitely made an impact on the Green Giant's stock.

In case you haven't heard already, Western Digital released a new version of their Raptor series of hard drives, the VelociRaptor.  Easily the fastest single hard drive around, and now with 300 GBs of space.

Also, I'm now using a Phenom X4 9850 BE CPU, 4GB Corsair Dominator 1066 MHz RAM, Biostar's TForce TA780G M2+ HP motherboard, and Seagate's Barracuda 7200.10 750 GB hard drive.  I just installed the new hardware yesterday, so I haven't had a chance to see the improvements yet, but I'll do some tests next week.  I'm definitely liking the 9850 BE/780G combo for sure.

Katy took this picture last year at the State Fair.  This was a little curly section of a small vine that was just below where we saw the Paper Wasp.  I love the vibrancy of the greens and the use of the Rule of Thirds.

I first posted about TGIMBOEJ a few weeks ago.

Well now I have my first box.  I haven't taken any pictures of the loot yet, but I'll do that soon.  There are some interesting pieces of hardware in the box (codenamed Toronto).  One of these, an ammeter, lots of LEDs, some seven-segment displays, an old AMD/Intel microcontroller, a bunch of random components and some more strange things.  Stay tuned for more details.

This is a Paper Wasp I saw last year at the State Fair.

Here's Zac the night before he graduated from VMI.

I'm back in town now.  Photos and stories will come later.

Again, this is from the Salzhauers Anniversary.  It's the place setting on the tables they had set.  The tablecloth and utensils has a little bit of a blue tint in the original photo, so I desaturated all the colors except red.  This is definitely one of my most favorite photos.  Katy said it is one of her favorites too.

Intel recently showed a demo of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars with a highly modified engine using ray tracing.  TG Daily has the report with a few pictures.  Interestingly enough, Intel was running the demo on a 64-bit Linux distribution, which means, of course, it was also using OpenGL.  Yes, Intel supports ray tracing on 32- and 64-bit versions of both Windows and Linux.  Nice.

It will be a while (if ever) before ray tracing is standard fare on the desktop, but progress is being made rapidly toward that possibility.  Reflections, refractions, collision detection, and lighting will all be much more realistic with ray tracing.  It's cool stuff and it will be interesting to see how it progresses over the next few years.

Here's another photo from the Salzhauers Anniversary.  They had some beautiful centerpieces on each table with all sorts of flowers.  This one is a pink rose and that's a blue hydrangea in the background.  You can also see the colors of a white and pink lily petal behind the rose.