Solder without burning holes in the carpet?

I just saw this Cold Heat Soldering Tool on tv while watching the secret life of machines, and it reminded me of how I used to burn holes in carpet (on accident) in my younger years. I'm so glad I work somewhere with professional soldering setups.

Kernel.org got faster...

I finally finished updating everything on The Linux Kernel Archives so that it now uses vsftpd instead of proftpd, a 2.6 linux kernel, a more modern distribution than Red Hat 7.2 and I fixed up various graphics on the web pages to be more "modern" versions. We went from serving 150mbps at a load average of 200 to well over 300mbps with a load average of about 20. *whew* glad that's done.

Can you take a bad photo at Yosemite?

Well my trip to Yosemite National Park is coming up Wednesday and I'm just noticing that today's weather forcast shows a 40% chance of snow Friday and Saturday, and the park service says that the recent warm weather has caused a lot of snow to melt and make nice waterfalls earlier this year, so I'm looking forward to my first trip there. I'll be taking all my camera equipment, so with any luck my photo page will be bursting with new images of everything I see. I plan to take 2.5GB of compact flash with me.

What would the smell-o-scope say?

My new Futurama, Vol. 3 (1999) dvd arrived today, though amazon originally shipped it on the 5th. It was worth the wait... This is a show that should never have been cancelled.