Enter the smart braking system. A senior design team at VT developed a horizontal light bar to communicate slowing and stopping actions to a driver in a vehicle that follows the car in question. The solution is pretty clever: the brake light communicates slowing and urgent stopping, instead of just simply letting you know that the brake is being depressed. How does it work? The concept uses an array of horizontally arranged LED lights. When you begin to slow down, the lights in the center glow orange, after a certain threshold side lights turn to red, and if you’re slamming on the brakes, they’ll all flash red.

I’ve been thinking about an idea like that for a while, and I am glad someone came up with a prototype. It would be neat to see this idea turn to reality in future cars. However, there is a drawback. It seems that the biggest challenge is to mass-produce the sucker at a cheap cost; as it stands now, each light bar costs $50 to produce, too much to tickle the automotive industry to seriously consider this neat – but useful – idea.

I decided to write something about AOL because I just received an e-mail from an AOL user saying that my previous e-mails to that account have been sent to the junk folder. I really don’t understand how that could have happened, as I was using a .edu address.

Which begs the question: why would anyone still use AOL as their internet client, when one can get DSL internet and use Mozilla Firefox as their browser? The concept of “signing on” to the internet baffles me in this day and age. Why not just double click on a browser and be instantly connected?

I am guessing that those who do use AOL are the users of AOL who have been with the company since the start, and over the years, have been unable to break away from their “sticky features” (hey, “You’ve got mail!”). But these people don’t realize how evil AOL is. In lawsuits filed against AOL, the company failed to stop billing people after their accounts have been canceled, either by the company or the user. AOL also has a deceptive way of calculating how long you’re online: they would add fifteen seconds to the time a user was connected to the service and round up to the next whole minute (thus, a person who used the service for just forty-six seconds – maybe to briefly check their e-mail – would be charged for two whole minutes! AOL is a company that doesn’t value its customers’ privacy, and have been involved in some notorious scandals in the past.

I still have those AOL free trial disks somewhere in the basement. If you’ll excuse me, I am going to go and microwave them now.

Today, the National Weather Service (NWS) confirmed that it was a tornado that touched upon in Atlanta. NWS mentioned that the winds exceeded 130 miles per hour in yesterday’s tornado. This was a very strange event indeed, as tornadoes rarely touch down in city centers. According to the second map on this page, the chance of tornadoes touching down in Atlanta that day were about 2%.

Right now, I like the WordPress theme that I am using for its simplicity. However, there are a few things I want to change. First, did you notice the links at the top? Currently I have the following pages to the right of the blog name: about, photoblog, secret, random, books, music, and movies+tv. If you haven’t checked those pages yet, do it now. What I was trying to do figure out is whether there is ability to alter the sizes of those boxes and the colour of the links (currently it’s defaulted to blue when you hover your mouse over it).

Second, I am not sure how I feel about categories and tags. On the one hand, tagging and categorizing posts would make them easier to find in the future; on the other hand, I think all these tags and categories are unsightly and take away from the minimalist presentation. I do think the archives, which are currently found on the bottom right of the blog, are useful to have. However, I think they belong on the right, not the bottom.

Third, I would like to change the colour of hyperlinks from that girly pink to something less ostentatious. However, I am not sure if wordpress will allow this customization. The bold, flamboyant pink departs so far from hyperlinks on my photoblog, which aren’t even presented in a different colour; in essence, it becomes a scavenger hunt to find links embedded in the captions of my photos because I don’t necessarily point the viewer to the hyperlinks all the time.

Given the above three points, don’t be surprised if the layout of this blog changes in the next few days. I am still in the process of tweaking this blog to suit my style.

More on this later.