Ok, I am going to wallow in my geekiness. I went ahead and bought a Pro-Lite led marquee Model PL-M2014RV6 (aka Tru-ColorII ) on eBay for 150 hard earned American dollars.

I mounted it in my cube, connected it to the serial port of my computer and proceeded to hack together a perl script that talks to it. Easy enough. Then I innovated (in a Microsoft meaning of the word) - wrote a script that parses our weblogs and outputs what people search for on the marquee with fancy dissolve effects. Add a couple of lava lamps and it'll be just like Googleplex.

I read up on Pro-Lite programming on this website, but ended up not using any of the code from there. Also some of the information there is outdated - the ROM on my sign is version 6.5

P.S. For those of you who are wondering, "tru" colors are: red, orange, yellow, lime (!) and green. They come in dim, normal and bright varieties, also rainbow, red/green, red on green and other combinations. All other colors are not "tru".

If you've been readin my journal for a while, you might know how important dreams are to me.

There are a lot of important and famous dreams recorded in history - Mendeleev seeing the periodic table; Kekule seeing the worm Oroborous and understanding the benzine ring; Chief Sitting Bull seeing soldiers falling upside down and predicting victory of the Little Big Horn, Hitler seeing the trench engulfed in molten lava in his dream and leaving it thus saving himself, Julius Caesar having a dream in which one website that will be left unnamed says "his mother appeared" and then "taking" Rome, etc.

Over the weekend I was reading Igor Sikorsky, His Three Careers in Aviation and in it came by an example of a forshadowing dream that I haven't encountered before.

The book says that when he was 11 years old, Sikorsky had a dream in which he was standing in a narrow passageway. There was a bluish light overhead and the floor with a fine carpet under his feet. The floor was vibrating, but for some reason he immediately realized that it wasn't a train or a boat, but a flying machine. He walked through to a door that led to a richly decorated lounge and then woke up. Since he was born in 1889, this would make it the year of 1900 when he had the dream. The Wright Brothers flight was three years away.

Years later, in America Sikorsky was walking through his latest design, the S-40 plane and was struck by a sense of deja vu. There it was, bluish light of fluorescent lamps overhead, the vibration and the fine carpet and even the smoking lounge at the end.

(the photo is from Igor Sikorsky, His Three Careers in Aviation)

Next in my reading queue: John C. Wright's The Last Guardian of Everness - a fantasy that deals with dream worlds and such. Figures.

Inspired by Howard Kunstler's Eyesore of the Month, which currently features Frank Gehry's Museum of Tolerance  that looks like robot's puke ,  I decided to start my own section on architectural monstrosities.

Behold - The Six of Diamonds Building.

Just the first look at it puzzled me immediatly. Is this a residential or a commercial building? How many floors are there in the structure? What is the function of the small square windows on the facade?  Is there a windowless torture chamber on the top floor beautified with the green diamonds? It seems like pepto-bismol would have been a better choice of color, but then that's probably what it was before fading out.