Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs Inc. from Chris Cairns on Vimeo.

http://www.neurosonicsaudiomedical.com/

Read the original blog post here How awesome is this? Content copyright Nick Coyne Photography, Cape Town wedding photographer.

Since I got a new camera lens for Christmas, I’ve really gotten back into my photography. I signed up for a course at the Cape Town School of Photography and have been taking a lot of pics. Then I discovered the great community at Flickr, and have been slowly sucked into a Flickr vortex.

So if you’re wondering what I’m up to, please have a look at my photostream.

Read the original blog post here Sucked into a Flickr vortex Content copyright Nick Coyne Photography, Cape Town wedding photographer.

Read the original blog post here Man but this looks like fun! Content copyright Nick Coyne Photography, Cape Town wedding photographer.

There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world, however since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the population reference bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.

Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say, that for every Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000 of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purpose of our calculations). We are talking about 1.25 km per household, a total of 120.8 million km, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa’s sleigh is moving at 1040 km per second……..3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 43.8 km per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 25 km per hour.

The pay load of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium Lego set (1 kg), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 140 kg, even granting that the “flying” reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can’t be done with eight or even nine of them……Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth 2 (the ship, not the monarch).

600,000 tons travelling at 1040 km per second creates enormous air resistance….this would heat up the lead reindeer in the same fashion as a space shuttle re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 1040 km/s in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 G’s. A 115 kg Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 2,012,500 kg of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.

Therefore, if Santa did exist, he’s dead now.

Read the original blog post here SANTA – AN ENGINEER’S PERSPECTIVE Content copyright Nick Coyne Photography, Cape Town wedding photographer.

The solution is to install VMWare Fusion, which lets you run a Windows virtual machine on the Mac. Sounds inefficient in theory, but reality is that both apps run a lot faster than they did on my old Dell.

To get my Powertap downloading to CyclingPeaks I needed to install the USB driver from the Saris website. Once that was done VMWare picked it up on COM3, and CyclingPeaks downloaded first time.

Read the original blog post here CyclingPeaks on VMWare Content copyright Nick Coyne Photography, Cape Town wedding photographer.

This is my first video game console since Atari, way back when.

I got it with Wii Sports and Wii Play. Wii Sports is as good as they say it is. Favourites are tennis and bowling. Wii Play are all pretty simple games, but the best one has to be the cow racing.

Read the original blog post here My Wii has arrived! Content copyright Nick Coyne Photography, Cape Town wedding photographer.

Read the original blog post here Finally! Content copyright Nick Coyne Photography, Cape Town wedding photographer.

Read the original blog post here http://simpsonizeme.com/ Content copyright Nick Coyne Photography, Cape Town wedding photographer.

Then to complicate things even more, we’re splitting our company into two. So now we have Glasshouse Multimedia (new website coming soon) – web and multimedia design specialists, and my new baby, CodeVader (website to come still!), Agile web development specialists. The two companies will still work very closely together, but they will operate independently. There’s several strategic reasons for the split that I won’t go into here, but there’s some really positive outcomes for me.

Firstly, I’ll be getting back into programming and building of web apps. In the last year or two my job has become more and more an admin one. Not fun. CodeVader will let me start building stuff again. Secondly, we’re going to run it remotely. So no office – all the guys will work from home. A few years back I probably would have thought this was a bad idea, but with modern technology like skype, IM, email and of course phones, its actually pretty painless. Of course a face-to-face meeting is still needed occasionally, but not as often as you think. Then we have the wonder of Google Docs for sharing files, and great software like TargetProcess for managing our projects.

So to start we have myself and two full-time developers, and one contract developer. We’ll be looking for one or two more people shortly, I’m sure. We’re focusing on Ruby on Rails development using an Agile methodology (based mostly on Scrum).

Things have started with a bang and we’re already running at full capacity, which is nice!

Read the original blog post here I'm still around! Content copyright Nick Coyne Photography, Cape Town wedding photographer.

Follow Max’s escapades at http://maxisincharge.wordpress.com/

Read the original blog post here Introducing… Max the Boston Terrier Content copyright Nick Coyne Photography, Cape Town wedding photographer.