So, I had a thought while trying to fall asleep the other day. If you’ve ever watched the movie Twister, you’d know that they were trying to gather data on tornadoes by dropping a delivery device in the path of a tornado and hoping it would hit it to lift sensors up into the body of the tornado to gain some insight on how it works.

So, here’s my thought: Why not use some military technology to make it a bit easier? If the military has the ability to hit a specific window of a building with a smart bomb, why can’t we use that same principle to get close enough to a tornado to drop a payload into it? And not just a bomb, how about modify one of those cluster bombs to drop hundreds of the probes into a tornado.

Get someone on the ground with a laser targeting device and point it at the tornado (hoping that the debris would provide enough reflectivity to get a signal), while simultaneously using GPS to track it. Get some kind of aircraft to fly over the storm, drop the bomb into the storm at the targeted tornado. Do this, and before the bomb hits (50ft or so above ground) have it detonate and spread the sensors into the storm.

Might be a little safer than running into the path of a storm, dropping something in it’s path, and trying to make it out of the way before you get creamed by the tornado.

I wasn’t really going anywhere with this, just writing down my random thoughts.

I came across this website the other day using some really ingenious css that would change the state of a menu item as you hover over it with the mouse, while also changing the states of all other items in the menu that are not hovered. Pretty interesting. I’ve been so hooked on jQuery lately that I was curious to see if I could throw something together quickly that accomplished the same feat. It was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be.

$(function(){
$("#menu li").hover(function() {
$(this).addClass("hover");
$("#menu li").not(".hover").addClass("nothover");
},function(){
$(this).removeClass("hover");
$("#menu li").not(".hover").removeClass("nothover");
});
});

Basically, I made it so that when the list item “li” contained in the “#menu” container is hovered over with the mouse, a class of “hover” is added to that item, while every list item not hovered in that set gets a class of “nothover”. Now, once the user’s mouse exits the list item, it removes both the “hover” and “nothover” classes. Simple, eh?

From here you could easily make the CSS markup for each event and state, and duplicate what the previous website did with just CSS.

Here is an example. Right click and ’save as’ to save the source code.

Keeping up with people on the web had become extremely easy with the advent of RSS. Now we can use the same technology used to keep up with all the popular blogs, but with your own friends!

Log In

First, we’re going to need to log-in to MySpace. Point your favorite browser to MySpace.com and enter your username and password. Next, we’ll need to find a person who blogs in MySpace to follow. My suggestion would be your girlfriend or another close friend who will be amazed at your attentiveness to what they’ve been blogging about. Go down to your “Friend Space” and select the friend you wish to follow. Select their blog page and look in the top right hand corner for the “rss” link.

Subscribe

I’ve had some issues with just clicking on the link and it adding to my RSS reader, so if you have problems you’ll want to right click and copy the link. Now all that’s left is adding that subscription into your favorite flavor of RSS reader.

Enjoy!

Keeping up with all your friends on Facebook can get to be a real chore, expecially when you have to log into your account just to check out what’s going on. Why can’t I just grab any new content in something that I use every day, such as an RSS reader? Well, you can! Today, I’ll outline how to create an RSS feed in Facebook and subscribe to it in your favorite RSS reader.

First, you’re going to want to log into your facebook account. From here you can go to your posted news page via http://www.new.facebook.com/posted.php.

Enter this into your browser's address bar.

Scroll down and look on the right column to right click on the link labeled “My Friends’ Posted Items” and copy the url.

Next, we’ll open up your favorite RSS reader (in my case, Google Reader) and add a new subscription using the copied text.

Now you can sit back and check in on all your friends from the comfort of your favorite RSS reader, making it much easier to keep up on everything going on with your friends.