At first glance, Google Finance doesn’t appear to have anything that all of the other finance websites don’t have. That is…until you pull up information on a particular company and see the charts. This is where Google Finance really shines. Enter in a name such as Microsoft or Apple and you’re treated with an interactive chart that allows you see news/events as they correspond with the stock price. You’re also able to focus the chart on a specific time period(by expanding the scroll bar above the chart). Once you do this, Google automatically updates to show the news for the specified dates.

Other nice features is the detailed information given on the management of the company. For instance, according to the info on Apple, Steve Jobs, age 51, is the CEO and Director of Apple and has been so since 1998. His yearly compensation is $1 and he has $5 Million+ in exercisable stock options.

Overall, Google Finance looks to be a great tool for the day traders abound.

Google Finance

The interior of the sun is around 15 million degrees fahrenheit.  In Albuquerque, NM, scientists at Sandia Labs have managed to hit temperatures exceeding 3 billion degrees fahrenheit with the Z machine (a powerful X-ray generator).  What came as a surprise is that the sudden increase in temperature was achieved after it’s energy had seemingly been depleted and that the sudden burst of energy seemed to be coming from some unknown source.

Sandia National Laboratories

Along with news that CERN is going to be(if they haven’t already) producing black holes within their labs, it seems to me that we may be on the verge of a new era of science. The machines used to produce the results above were in facilities that were about as large as a high school gymnasium! Imagine what the world would be like if our next form of efficient energy were safer than a nuclear reactor and several times smaller.

In about 96hrs, I’ll be resurrecting my WoW(World of Warcraft) account.  I haven’t actually played since back in November and am looking forward to all the new features that have been added.  Plus, it’ll be an excellent test of my new gaming rig.

Previously, I played WoW on my current setup: a 2.2Ghz pc with ~700Mb of ram, 500Mhz FSB, and a slow 256Mb PCI graphics card.  My new rig has a combined processing power of 4.4Ghz, 1Gb of ram, 1Ghz FSB, and a 256Mb PCI-E graphics card. w00t!

I also invested in a nice Western Digital SATA hard drive to help lessen that particular bottleneck.  Future upgrades will include a 10,000 RPM Raptor or 15,000 RPM Fujitsu hard drive, 3Gb of Ram, and another graphics card.

The only bad thing about the whole ordeal is that I gave away EVERYTHING on my character before ending my subscription previously. So…my lvl 56 rogue has pretty much nothing on him.  On the Warsong server, that smells of endless gankings. =(

In other news, I did some searching for John Marshall’s Student Bar Association website and…found out they didn’t have one.  Nor do any of their other associations.  That will definitely have to be corrected. =D

When I put a few seeds from an apple I had eaten into one of the pots around the house, I didn’t really expect anything to come of it.  But then one day I noticed something had grown and a week later another one popped up.  Now the count is up to four from an initial planting of about 10-12 seeds.

Unfortunately, I’ve also read that even if they produce fruit they probably won’t taste like the apple they came from.  Apparently, the Fuji Apple is a cross between the Red Delicious (It’s not) and the Ralls Janet. The apples that will come from these will be a cross of themselves….but, I’m not certain how that will make them taste different. So, who knows.

For those that don’t have an Apple computer, and for those Apple owners that don’t own OSX Tiger, there is an excellent and free alternative for installing widgets on your computer.  Formerly known as “Konfabulator”, Yahoo! Widgets offers a wide array of applications/widgets that you can place on your desktop.  Personally, I’ve installed a few for monitoring the weather, movie showtimes, computer stats, maps, and moon phases.  But, there are hundreds of different ones available.

Yahoo! Widgets