March 21, 2010
Erupting volcano in Iceland
A volcano near the EyjafallajΓΆkull glacier in Iceland has erupted forcing over 500 people to evacuate the area. Usually volcano eruptions are preceded by earthquakes, but this time the eruption came as a big surprise. No damage or injuries have so far been reported. A state of emergency has been declared in the area near the 160 kmΒ² glacier.
The last time a volcano erupted near the glacier was in 1823.
March 19, 2010
Fulham had to win by two goals to avoid being out of the Europa League, that’s a tough situation against a team like Juventus. The Italians, however, have been out of balance lately.
Juventus started well when David Trezeguet scored the first goal after no more than two minutes. Fulham now needed three goals to advance. After 40 minutes Bobby Zamora tied it 1-1 and the Hungarian Zoltan Gera then scored twice to make it 3-1.
Juventus wasn’t doing themselves any favours though as a red card for Fabio Cannavaro resulted in only 10 players. And things didn’t improve when Jonathan Zebina got a red card too, but by then it was all over.
With eight minutes to go Clint Dempsey made a beautiful 4-1 goal and once the whistle was blown Juventus was out of the tournament and Fulham could start celebrating the fact that they now had advanced to the quarter finals.
March 4, 2010
While looking through the logs for one of my sites I stumbled across lots of visits from the host server.aaaaa.com which seems to be crawling around my site. Nice bots and crawlers always have the decency of at least supply something as the HTTP_USER_AGENT, quite often with a URL to a nice little page where webmasters can be assured that their bot is only up to good stuff. The server.aaaaa.com, however, has the HTTP_USER_AGENT all blank.
That surely raises suspicion in me that it’s up to no good. A spam bot, perhaps?
www.aaaaa.com and aaaaa.com takes you to a domain parking place. That doesn’t really strike me as a good sign either.
The whois records show that the website is registered in Seoul, South Korea.
Has anyone any idea what server.aaaaa.com is up to?
Off course, it’s quite easy to just ban it from the site if you’re nervous about it, but I’m more curious, than nervous. 
If you have any info, please comment on this page.
March 3, 2010
NASA scientists have computed how Earth’s rotation should have changed as a result of the 8.8 magnitude earthquake in Chile on February 27.
Preliminary calculations by JPL reasearch scientist Richard Gross show that the length of an Earth day has been shortened by about 1.26 microseconds. Furthermore the quake should have moved Earth’s figure axis by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters).
More info:
Chilean quake may have shortened Earth days
March 3, 2010
The fish weren't this big.
The small Australian town of Lajamanu recently had a downpour of fish. Perhaps not quite what you expect in a town located far fron the ocean, lakes or other types of water.
The fish have probably, according to a senior forecaster at the weather bureau, been picked up by a tornado, gets deep-freezed at high altitude and then fall down as rain.
The fish rain phenomenon occured at twice on Thursday and Friday afternoon.
A local said to Northern Territory News “Thank god it didn’t rain crocodiles.”.
More reading:
It’s raining fish… no really
March 1, 2010
This weekend has been a true test of strengths for everyone addicted to the PlayStation Network. Not only did it forcefully log out users from the service and preventing them to play online games, it also appears to have affected downloaded games and have removed hard earned trophies from users.
On the PlayStation blog Sony says to be working on the problem and states that it has only affected users of the original first generation big PlayStation 3′s and not the new slim versions.
Know that we have narrowed down the issue and have engineers working to restore service even as you read this. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you, and genuinely appreciate your patience while we work to resolve this.
The affected systems also have had their date set back to December 31, 1999 or January 1st 2000.
Speculations online suggests that it might not really be a fault of the PlayStation Network but something to do with the console’s internal hardware.
It remains to be seen how quick Sony can fix this embarrassing problem. Oh dear, Sony.
March 1, 2010
Keith Elam, more known as Guru, founding member of the hip hop group Gang Starr is in a coma after suffering from a heart attack. Guru is currently being treated at a New York hospital.
The 43 year old rapper released his first album, called No More Mr. Nice Guy, with Gang Starr in 1989 and has also released numerous solo albums and collaborated with many artists within broad genres of music.
February 28, 2010
Xynthia hits Western Europe
A storm named Xynthia has hit Western Europe today. French Prime Miniter Francois Fillon has declared i a national catastrophe and the storm has claimed at least 45 lives in France.
The storm with hurricane-strength winds has brought down trees and power lines and caused heavy flooding in places. At least 1 million households were without electricity on Sunday afternoon. Winds up to 200 km/h were measured.
Deaths have also been reported from Spain, Portugal, Germany, England and Belgium, mostly caused by falling trees.
The storm Xynthia is moving north towards Belgium, Luxemburg and Scandinavia.
February 28, 2010
Tonight is the big night. USA vs. Canada in the gold medal hockey game. The Canadiens are more or less expecting a gold from their team but U.S.A. have certainly impressed a lot of people in this tournament. But can they beat Canada twice?
In the semi-finals Canada had an unexpectably tough game against Slovakia, who had eliminated the reigning Olympic champions Sweden. In the other semi U.S.A. outplayed Finland 6 to 1.
It’s the final North America has been hoping for and something tells me it will be a tight game.
February 28, 2010
The earthquake outside of the coast of Chile did not just create destruction directly on land with more than two million people affected and around half a million destroyed houses. It also issued a tsunami warning and big waves were expected to hit Hawaii.
The evacuation from the coast line started quickly thanks to the tsunami warning and waves as waves of up to 2.5 metres could hit shore.
Fortunately the big tsunami didn’t appear and the waves were relatively small and did no damage.