Romney Drops Out of Race

Mitt Romney is dropping out of the race for president after failing to rack up significant numbers of delegates on Super Tuesday.

Romney made the announcement today at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a yearly gathering of conservatives in Washington, D.C. His remarks can be found here.

Romney has spent at least $50 million of his own money so far in the campaign but was only able to win a handful of states on Super Tuesday - Massachusetts and Utah and the GOP caucuses in Colorado, North Dakota, Minnesota and Montana. He also picked up the GOP nomination earlier this week in Maine and also won in Michigan.

But his total number of delegates only came up to 133, placing him third in the GOP race. He needed 1,191 to win the nomination.

Romney's successful run for the governor's office in Massachusetts has long been seen as his launchpad for higher office and he served only a single term. His decision not to run again broke the hold the Republicans have had on the governor's office here over nearly two decades.

He also ran unsuccessfully for U.S. senator against Democrat Edward M. Kennedy in 1996.

Despite winning Massachusetts overall, Romney lost to John McCain among voters in the western end of the state by a 2-1 margin in many towns. Romney rarely ventured west of Springfield while in office and had little support here in his run for governor.

Both his predecessors, A. Paul Celucci and Jane Swift, of Williamstown, are strong McCain supporters. Romney is the third prominent Massachusetts politician to fail in a bid for the White House in the last 20 years: former Gov. Michael Dukakis was the Democratic nominee in 1988 and U.S. Sen. John Kerry the Democratic nominee in 2004.

Bad Weather Threatens Shuttle Launch

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - NASA pressed ahead with Thursday's planned launch of shuttle Atlantis, even though bad weather threatened to delay the mission to add another science lab to the international space station.

Forecasters said there was a 70 percent chance that rain, clouds and possibly even a severe thunderstorm would keep Atlantis on the pad for yet another day. The space shuttle already is two months late in delivering the European lab, Columbus, to the space station.

Faulty fuel gauges grounded Atlantis in December. Engineers worked round the clock and through the holidays to fix the problem, which turned out to be a bad connector in the external fuel tank.

Although confident of the repair, NASA officials acknowledged they would be monitoring Atlantis' fuel gauges with more interest than usual, once fueling got under way.

NASA said at least three of the four fuel gauges must work properly once Atlantis' tank is filled in order for the launch to proceed. The gauges are part of a critical safety system to help ensure that the main engines do not run on an unexpectedly empty tank during the 8 1/2-minute climb to orbit. They have performed erratically during countdowns for nearly three years and postponed several launches.

Columbus—a $2 billion high-tech laboratory—is the European Space Agency's primary contribution to the space station. In the making for 23 years, the lab has endured station redesigns and slowdowns, as well as a number of shuttle postponements and two shuttle accidents.

It will join the U.S. lab, Destiny, already flying for seven years. The much bigger Japanese lab Kibo, or Hope, will require three shuttle flights to get off the ground, beginning in March.

The Europeans also are on the verge of launching their new cargo ship, Jules Verne. It's scheduled to blast off from French Guiana in early March.

"There's going to be a lot of pride, a lot of people with good feelings in their stomachs, when these things go up," said Europe's space station program manager, Alan Thirkettle.

The European Space Agency already has spent more than $7 billion on the station program and plans to invest an additional $6 billion by Thirkettle said.

Besides Columbus, Atlantis will drop off a new space station resident, a French Air Force general who will take the place of NASA astronaut Daniel Tani and get Columbus working. Tani will return to Earth aboard the shuttle, ending a mission of nearly four months.

NASA is anxious about getting Atlantis flying as soon as possible to keep alive its plan for six shuttle missions this year. The space agency faces a 2010 deadline for finishing the station and retiring the shuttles.

Zymurgist

Zymurgy

Zymurgy or zymology is the study of fermentation. The word was originally used to describe the science involved in these processes but it has since become more broadly used to describe the brewing of alcoholic beverages. A zymurgist (or zymologist) is one who studies zymurgy.

Zymurgy is the name of a homebrewers magazine. The word also can be found in the names of several organizations involved in brewing alcohol.

History

Louis Pasteur is considered to have been the first zymologist when, in 1857, he connected yeast to fermentation. Pasteur originally defined fermentation as "respiration without air". The German Eduard Buchner, winner of the 1907 Nobel Prize in chemistry, later determined that fermentation was actually caused by the yeast's secretion of an enzyme that he called zymase.

Trivia

Zymurgy is the last word in most English-language dictionaries, excluding proper nouns and onomatopoetic words.

FFDShow MPEG-4 Video Decoder 20080127 rev1821

FFDShow MPEG Video Decoder description
Great DirectShow decoding filter for decompressing DIVX movies, picture postprocessing
ffdshow is a set of DirectShow filters and VFW codec for video compression, decompression and processing and audio compression and processing.

You can play almost any movie using ffdshow.

FFDShow uses libavcodec from ffmpeg project or for video decompression (it can use xvid.dll installed with xvid codec too), postprocessing code from mplayer to enhance visual quality of low bitrate movies, and is based on original DirectShow filter from XviD, which is GPL'ed educational implementation of MPEG4 encoder.

Here are some key features of "FFDShow MPEG Video Decoder":

· fast video decompression using optimized MMX, SSE and 3DNow! code
· support for different codecs: XviD, all DivX versions, MS WMV, MPEG-1 and - MPEG-2
· image postprocessing for higher playback quality
· automatic quality control: automatically reduces postprocessing level when CPU load is high
· hue, saturation and luminance correction
· experimental sharpening filter
· noising (of course if you want it)
· presets
· completely free software: ffdshow is distributed under GPL
· support for various subtitle formats

The Year Of The Rat, 2008

According to the Chinese Zodiac, the Year of 2008 is a Year of the Rat (Earth), which begins on February 7, 2008 and ends on January 25, 2009. First in the cycle of 12 Animal signs, Rat Year begins the sequence and recurs every twelfth year. It is a time of renewal in so many ways. From New Year to Valentine's Day, to the arrival of spring, may all the blessings and delights of the New Year be yours.

A Rat Year is a time of hard work, activity, and renewal. This is a good year to begin a new job, get married, launch a product or make a fresh start. Ventures begun now may not yield fast returns, but opportunities will come for people who are well prepared and resourceful. The best way for you to succeed is to be patient, let things develop slowly, and make the most of every opening you can find. People born in an Earth Rat are said to be logical realists, shrewd, charming, ambitious, and inventive. Of course, the entire horoscope must be considered when making any personality assessment.

In Chinese, the Rat is respected and considered a courageous, enterprising person. People born in the Year of Rat are clever and bright, sociable and family-minded. They have broad interests and strong ability in adapting to the environment and able to react adequately to any changes.

They are gifted in many ways and have an easy going manner. They are active and pleasant, tactful and fantastic, and are able to grasp opportunities. They seem to have interests in everything and hope to participate in doing it and usually do it very well.

Following are my Chinese brush paintings to celebrate the Year of the Rat. Please click the images for more information.

Gung Hay Fat Choy! Year 4706

Gung Hay Fat Choy! Have you ever heard anyone shouting out Gung Hay Fat Choy to you? Well, if you did, realize they weren’t calling you obese. Instead, they were wishing you a Happy Chinese New Year.

It is year 4706, aka the Year of the Rat, so be nice to rodents this year.

Even Google got in the act today. Here’s their Year of the Rat Logo. Check out the rats looking at the calendar.

I wish you all the best in 4706. Gung Hay Fat Chow!